@artistdaniellescott

 Danielle Scott is a mixed-media assemblage artist who grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey.  Her work expresses politically and socially charged messaging. She recently received the 2021 Artist of the Year from ESKFF,  which is the Eileen S. Kaminksy Family Foundation Artist residency Program in Mana Contemporary, Jersey city.

A soft-spoken artist, Danielle has begun to use her art as a conduit to explore bold; fearless, 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.

Featured Work:

Celestine (3 girls) (2022) | Mixed assemblage | $4,500

Hatwell, Gray, Bernaby and Eugene (2022) | Mixed medium assemblage | $4,500

“An artist has one duty and that is to tell the times.”  – Nina Simone  

I created this work to allure and to create thought provoking dialect.  I want viewers to get absorbed in the work and to feel it as I do.  I want the work to be a perfect rendering of emotion and a spiritual tugging of the whole self. 

After spending 20 years of my career as an oil painter, my career shifted unexpectedly in 2018 as I walked the streets of one of my ancestral homelands, Cuba.  It was my first time in the country, yet as I slept and woke, and walked, and worked, I felt a tug at my 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, in a way tugged at my soul.  The art and I were in communion, my ancestors powerful voices whispering to my soul, their stories written into the walls.  I was home. 

 This started my awakening. No single medium alone would ever again be enough to express all that the times were calling me to say.  I was a painter, but I put aside my paintbrush.  I needed more than paint.  I needed paint and paper, texture and color, objects lost and objects found, metal and cotton.  I needed to deconstruct and reassemble.  I needed to cut and cover and color and crown.  I needed to listen and to learn to speak in a thousand mediums to tell the stories that I now heard all around me, everywhere.  

This body of work comes from the journey that I’ve taken over the last year, visiting places that reflect pieces of these current times, our history, and my ever evolving understanding of my own self.  Each image called out for me.  Some were tucked away in boxes at the Amistad Research center. Some are my own photography, depicting things that resonated deeply with me as I planted my feet on plantation soil.  They spoke to me and so I 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 I collected as I traveled through the US and abroad.  

This exhibition illuminates  that treasure which is hidden to the naked eye.  Over the past year, I have 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 this exhibition 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”.