Isaac Scott, this year’s Eric Kenagy visiting artist, gave an artist talk Tuesday night on his recent work and career path. He also spoke in several art classes during his visit. Scott is a Philadelphia-based photographer, ceramic artist and art educator and holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
Scott’s primary artistic focus through high school and college was the potter’s wheel. However, in the second semester of his master’s program, the COVID pandemic hit and deprived him of his studio space. This opened the door for him to explore photography. As protests against the killing of George Floyd swept the country, Scott said, “I recognized that we were in this moment in history, and I just happened to have come across this tool to document it at the right time.” He said that he felt a responsibility to use his newfound passion for photography to document the movement: “A lot of time those moments just come and go and people don’t take the time to properly document it.” His photography of civil rights protests in Philadelphia were eventually featured in The New Yorker magazine.Continuing with the theme of social justice, Scott also spoke of an exhibit he did as part of a fellowship he was given from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts in Detroit. In this exhibit, he created a number of cup sized sculptures, colored and arranged into the Palestinian flag. The individual sculptures feature imagery of the “tearing up of the infrastructure, or a body,” speaking to the destruction left by war. However, he also incorporated images significant to Palestinian culture, such as poppy flowers and olive branches.
When asked by an audience member about what future projects he has coming up, Scott said he has been invited to contribute to a group show in Detroit celebrating Motown.
