John T. Scott was born in New Orleans, earning his BA in 1962 from Xavier University, and an MFA from Michigan State University in 1965. Scott spent time in New York City, where he established a presence and relationships with other experimental artists, including Melvin Edwards, but was primarily based in New Orleans, where he lived, worked, and taught at Xavier. Scott has a markedly diverse practice and is known for large-scale, brilliantly colored kinetic sculptures, as well as his carved woodblock prints depicting everyday scenes and religious iconography. In 2005, The New Orleans Museum of Art held a retrospective of Scott’s work titled Circle Dance: A John T. Scott Retrospective, featuring works from the artist’s forty-year-long career.
“What I’ve been attempting . . ., is to see things with what I describe as ‘jazz thinking,’ and it actually came from listening to musicians. . . . It’s improvisational thinking in the sense that I don’t have to contrive some system of connecting two things that don’t seem related because I understand the relationship.”