Double Sky by Zoe Scruggs

Double Sky features original mixed media paintings on wood panel, works on paper, and a new sound score by multidisciplinary artist Zoe Scruggs. From the traditional art-making forms of figurative portraiture and landscape painting, to the less traditional such as sound composition, music production, experimental new media and performance, Scruggs’ work defies easy categorization. Born and raised in southern Delaware, the artist’s expansive practice brings to life urgent issues that spur from Black ecological and Black feminist frameworks. Drawing on her own lived experience as a Black woman coming of age in the mid-Atlantic, she incorporates a diverse range of sources that reflect her upbringing and sociopolitical commitments. Her mother’s garden and crafting activities, the overrepresentation of African Americans in the U.S. prison system, plant science, Afro-futurism, Black and indigenous farming techniques, greenwashing, climate justice podcasts, historical figures, and inventors such as George Washington Carver all inform her work.

The title of the exhibition, Double Sky, describes a motif that recurs in Scruggs’ most recent work wherein the backgrounds of her paintings and works on paper split into otherworldly color combinations and stormy imagery. She builds up the surfaces of her paintings and works on paper with layers of paint and disparate source material to play with depth. These aesthetic choices animate Scruggs’ fascination with creating alternative space – outer space, inner space, open space – for Black world making, free from constraint and toxicity.

Beckler Family Gallery