WHOLESOME ENCOUNTERS

Artwork by William ScottText by Christabel Stewart

Untitled, 2014

The Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California was established in 1974 by psychologist Elias Katz and artist and educator Florence Ludins-Katz with the radical vision of providing studios and supplies to artists with developmental, mental, and physical disabilities. Following the mass closure of state psychiatric hospitals in California in the 1950s and 1960s, patients were released without medical or financial support, leaving many homeless and seeing many others imprisoned. The Center was founded with the goal of supporting these former patients through therapeutic, artistic, and creative support, and vocational training. William Scott is a San Francisco-based artist who has held a studio at Creative Growth Art since 1992 and whose work will be the inaugural exhibition at London-based Studio Voltaire, reopening after its own transformative renovations. The show will present over 80 works from his 30-year career, including many of his starkly striking portraits of living and recently passed icons and community members, which are interwoven with neatly painted text, such as, “William Scott on Good Spirits for the Peace”. Many of his works are organised as beaming, didactic informational poster-style works of what a sincere community of supportive people might look like. The works are compelling, colourful and deeply appealing, intertwining Scott’s own personal narrative with more extraordinary visions of humanity that enact the kinds of social change that counteract the many wrongs that racism, ablism and economic inequality have brought upon communities. ◉