“Passing It On: The Art of John T. Scott,” by Freddi Williams Evans and Anna Rita Scott, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 120 pages
The multimedia New Orleans artist and teacher John T. Scott often ended class with his signature phrase. “Pass it on,” he’d tell his students: simultaneously a farewell salute, a summing up of the day’s lesson and a call to action.
“I always find that if I pass my idea to somebody else and they develop it,” Scott said in a 1999 interview, “it comes back as an expanded idea, so I’m gaining.”
Born in 1940 at Charity Hospital, Scott spent his first years on a farm along Old Gentilly Road before his family moved to the Lower 9th Ward. He likened growing up in Jim Crow New Orleans, with its segregated schools, churches and sidewalks, to “walking through a land mine … always conscious of where not to step.”…