Location: Richmond, CA
Medium: Drawing, works on paper
Website: niadart.org
Serena Scott is a visual artist and a native of Richmond, California, who has worked in the studios of NIAD Art Center since the summer of 2018. NIAD (Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development) is a nonprofit art studio and gallery founded in Richmond in 1982 to provide working space, materials, and professional support for artists with developmental and physical disabilities.
In her time at NIAD, Scott developed a distinctive text-based practice using ink on paper. In 2021, her work was included in a student-led acquisition initiative in which the Mills College Art Museum (MCAM) purchased fourteen works by NIAD artists to help diversify its permanent collection. Scott’s piece Untitled (attracted) (2019) entered MCAM’s collection through that project and was featured in the museum’s 2022 exhibition Unseen: The Hidden Labor of Women. Her work has also entered the collection of Stanford Health Care in Palo Alto.
Scott’s practice centers on repetitive mark-making: a single word, hand-lettered in ink, written over and over until it fills the page edge to edge. The resulting compositions read at once as text and as pattern, their careful, obsessive lettering giving each piece what curators have described as a meditative, mantra-like quality. Many of her chosen words carry domestic or gendered undertones, inviting close, sustained looking that surfaces layered meanings within ordinary language.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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