John T. Scott, a New Orleans sculptor whose vibrantly colored kinetic art filtered the spirit of the African diaspora through a modernist lens, died Saturday in Houston. He was 67. Mr. Scott had fled his hometown just before Hurricane Katrina hit two years ago.
His death was confirmed by Ron Bechet, an artist and professor at Xavier University in New Orleans, where Mr. Scott had taught for 40 years. Bechet added that Mr. Scott had been chronically ill with pulmonary fibrosis and was recovering from a double lung transplant.
John T. Scott was born on a farm in the Gentilly section of New Orleans and raised in the city’s Lower 9th Ward. He said that his art training began at home, when he learned embroidery from his mother; his father was a chauffeur and restaurant cook. He attended Xavier, a Roman Catholic and historically black college, and then Michigan State University, where he studied with the painter Charles Pollock, Jackson Pollock’s brother. After completing his master of fine arts degree in 1965, he returned to Xavier to teach.
Mr. Scott’s earliest work drew on Christian religious imagery and classical mythology. But by the late 1960s, his sculptures and prints focused on African, African-American, Caribbean and Southern Creole cultures, reflecting their fusion in New Orleans itself. His assemblage style and welding technique were influenced by the playful but subtly structured dynamics of jazz as well as by dance. From the 1980s onward, with encouragement from the sculptor George Rickey, his half-abstract, boldly painted sculptures in metal and wood included kinetic components.
His “Diddlie Bow Series” (1983-84) was based on the attenuated shape of an African stringed instrument. His environmentally conceived “Circle Dance Series” (2001), inspired by African dances that were transformed into slaves’ courting rituals and that survive in New Orleans funeral processions, was described by the art historian Richard Powell as “a kind of stylized stageset/dreamworld.”
In 1992, Mr. Scott was awarded a “genius” grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and he used the money to build a larger studio.
