Elizabeth Talford Scott

American, 1916 - 2011

BiographyElizabeth Talford Scott was born near Chester, South Carolina in 1916 on Blackstock Plantation, where her grandparents were once held as slaves. Scott’s family members were craft people of all sorts, and her mother taught her to quilt at a young age. Discussing familial traditions of making, Scott once said, “That was the way of life in those days. We didn’t buy blankets and spreads the way we do today. The churches had clubs where people would get together and go to each other’s house and do quilting.”

Migrating to Baltimore in the 1940s, Scott married and began her family. She stopped regularly quilting out of necessity, working jobs in catering and childcare to support her family. Nonetheless, she kept up quilting as a hobby. Her daughter, Joyce Scott (also an artist), recalls: “I remember my mom used to quilt and do beadwork while watching soap operas on TV after she retired, or previously in the evening after she came home from work.” When Joyce left for college in the early 1970s, Scott returned to quilting full-time, becoming increasingly innovative with her materials and experimenting with three-dimensional works and wall hangings. In the 1980s, both her work and that of her daughter began to gain greater attention. The pair began teaching and lecturing together, and their artistic relationship flourished; they often borrowed ideas and materials from one another.

During her lifetime, Scott frequently exhibited in galleries and museums in Baltimore. She also participated in shows at The Studio Museum of Harlem, NY; The Museum of American Folk Art, NY; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her 1998 retrospective, Eyewinkers, Tumbleturds, and Candlebugs: The Art of Elizabeth Talford Scott, opened at the Maryland Institute College of Art and traveled to the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D.C. Since her death in 2011, the artist has been featured in many group exhibitions and has also been the joint subject of exhibitions featuring her work alongside her daughter’s. Discussing the artist’s increased recognition after her death, Goya Contemporary writes, “Her posthumous success points to long standing, systemic institutional structures that failed to recognize the work of significant female makers in their lifetimes, but [have] recently prompted reinvestigation into these important practices.” [excerpts from Goya Contemporary Gallery]

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