A lush appreciation of the African American printmaker, sculptor, and painter acclaimed as one of New Orleans's finest living artists

Circle Dance: The Art of John T. Scott is a celebration of this renowned artist's work in printmaking, sculpture, collage, and painting produced over the course of a nearly forty-year career. Published in conjunction with an exhibit of the same name at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Circle Dance features 100 dazzling color photographs of Scott's art, from his earliest productions in cast bronze, welded steel, and printmaking, to his most recent forays into site-specific public art and mammoth works on paper.

Born in 1940 and reared in New Orleans, John T. Scott has produced work shaped largely by diverse Afrocentric and distinctly local traditions. He draws heavily upon his African American heritage, asserting that African culture has influenced people in his hometown more than any other U.S. city. His art reflects elements of history, struggle, and a triumphant creative spirit. Black musical forms such as jazz, blues, and gospel have been central to Scott's art, which itself has been described as "optical jazz." In his analysis Richard J. Powell recognizes in Scott's art "a performance-based spirit and an improvisational quality, bold color, and visual syncopation."

Scott's work has been featured in scores of gallery and museum exhibitions, and he has received numerous awards and prizes. In 1992 he was honored for his career accomplishments with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Featuring a foreword by Ellis Marsalis and an appreciation by New Orleans arts patron, Mrs. Lindy Boggs, Circle Dance offers the best introduction possible to the work of this remarkable artist.

Richard J. Powell, Durham, North Carolina, is the John Spencer Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. Author of such books as The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism, Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson, and Black Art: A Cultural History, he has helped to organize several critically acclaimed art exhibits.

128 pp., 100 color photographs, exhibition checklist, bibliography