Visiting Artist Lecture Series Presents Danielle Scott
Visiting Artist Lecture Series Presents Danielle Scott
The Department of Art Presents Danielle Scott!
Bio: Danielle Scott is a mixed-media assemblage artist who grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey. Her work expresses politically and socially charged messaging . Danielle was nominated for a 2025 56th NAACP Image Award for her “ Outstanding Short Documentary “ Ancestral Call . The short will be featured in April 2025 on PBS American Masters . Danielle Scott was featured in the 2021 Essence Magazine as one of the top LGBTQ artists to look out for . Her works were acquired by The Newark Museum of Art 2021, by NYC Times best selling Author , Roxanne Gay, The Weissman Family Collection, and Nikole Hannah Jones, Pulitzer Prize Winning Reporter and Author of “ The 1619 Project “. Her work has been exhibited at The Montclair Museum , The Monmouth Museum , Morris Museum, Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora, and The Every Women NYC Biennial and 2024 Havana Biennale in Cuba. Danielle’s work has been internationally exhibited in Paris during Africa Week and will be shown at the 2024 Havana Biennial in Cuba. Danielle was an artist in residence at “ Chateau Orquevaux “ in France, “ American Schools of Angola” in Luanda, Angola, MECA College of Art and Design in Portland, Maine, and ESKFF at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. She was commissioned by the city of Newark to create several Public Art murals and the Limited Edition Newark Library card. She has received the Visual Artist of the Year from ESKFF and the City of “ Jersey City “ . Danielle was taught and mentored by the late “ Jack Whitten “ when she attended the School of Visual Arts.
A soft-spoken artist, Danielle has begun to use her art as a conduit to explore bold; fear less, thought-provoking work - work which draws its inspiration largely from her own journey and life experience. Her latest pieces are brazen offerings conveying the intense beauty and wretched pain the artist absorbs from the world around her. She creates using photo montage, found objects, paint, raw materials, old books, and collage. From vivid paintings to piercing photography to striking sculptures, all of Danielle’s artistic offerings aim to arrest the viewer and transport them away from the pretentious and into a realm rooted in truth.
Danielle creates work to allure and to create thought provoking dialect. She wants viewers to get absorbed in the work and to feel it as she does . She wants the work to be a perfect rendering of emotion and a spiritual tugging of the whole self.
After spending 20 years of her career as an oil painter, her career shifted unexpectedly in 2018 as Danielle walked the streets of one of her ancestral homelands, Cuba. It was the artist's first time in the country, yet as she slept and woke, and walked, and worked, she felt a tug at her core that was both foreign and familiar. The rich art that lined the streets and walls powerfully depicted the story of Cuba’s culture and history, reflected the times and the people, and, in a way, tugged at her soul. The art and Artist were in communion, with her ancestors’ powerful voices whispering to her soul, their stories written into the walls. Danielle was home.
This started the Artist awakening. No single medium alone would ever again be enough to express all that the times were calling her to say. She was a painter, but put aside the paintbrush. Danielle needed more than paint. She needed paint and paper, texture and color, objects lost and objects found, metal and cotton. She needed to deconstruct and reassemble. She needed to cut and cover and color and crown. Danielle needed to listen and to learn to speak in a thousand mediums to tell the stories that she now heard all around her, everywhere.
The Artist Present body of work comes from the journey that she took over the last year, visiting places that reflect pieces of these current times, our history, and her ever-evolving understanding of her own self. Each image called out to the Artist. Some were tucked away in boxes at the Amistad Research Center. Some are her own photography, depicting things that resonated deeply with her as she planted her feet on plantation soil. The images spoke to the artist, and so she told their stories through rich, assorted papers, free people of color data, written text, actual slave stories, 200-year-old book covers, hours upon hours of research upon research, and jewelry she collected as she traveled through the US and abroad.
This exhibition illuminates that treasure which is hidden to the naked eye. Over the past year, the Artist has been digging and digging for one of our hidden treasures, which has always been our ancestry, our lineage, our community, our stories, and ourselves. I want my work to “whisper to your soul”. I want this work to say, “come here, feel the soul of art”. I want the viewer to feel the power of the “ANCESTRAL CALL”.