One of the most important artists in the history of New Orleans, John T. Scott is renowned globally for his brightly colored and precisely balanced kinetic sculptures that draw from African American, African, and European traditions. Scott worked in a variety of media, including monumental prints like those on display here from the artist’s series Blues Poem for the Urban Landscape. Several of these prints were included in Scott’s 2005 retrospective exhibition at NOMA, and all are now part of the museum’s permanent collection.

While the series title suggests that these could be visions of any unnamed city, Scott’s imagery locates them very specifically in New Orleans, where he graduated from, practiced, and taught at Xavier
University of Louisiana. To represent the visual cacophony of the city, Scott packs each print from edge-to-edge with churches, corner stores, street signs, power lines, plants, and car parts wedged around elements of New Orleans’s distinctive architecture—each a reference in itself to the generations of African American artisans that built the city. Without a distinct horizon line, the tightly organized compositions are as immersive as they can be disorienting.

To make each print Scott carved into the surface of large sheets of plywood with a power saw and routing tools, creating lines and forms that are impressionistic but also visually imposing. The composite nature of these prints exemplifies Scott’s jazz-inspired explorations of what he called “spherical thinking,” or a non-linear way of simultaneously looking at the past, present, and future.
Here, in two dimensions, Scott uses the landscape to visualize the history of New Orleans, the vibrant city he saw before him, and provide some signposts to guide us towards the future.