Sam Scott is one of the most accomplished living abstract painters of New Mexico, a Chicago-born artist trained directly by the leading first-generation Abstract Expressionists, who has built across more than half a century in Santa Fe a distinctive lyrical-abstract idiom rooted in the landscape, light, and spiritual traditions of the American Southwest.
Sam Scott (born 1940, Chicago, Illinois) is an American abstract painter who has lived and worked in Santa Fe, New Mexico, since 1969. He trained as a painter in Baltimore, where his teachers included Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, David Hare, Grace Hartigan, and Salvatore Scarpitta — a roster of first- and second-generation Abstract Expressionist painters that gave him an unusually direct foundation in the New York School tradition. He graduated summa cum laude and received the Walters Art Museum Traveling Scholarship as the outstanding graduate student of his class.
His move to Santa Fe consolidated the lyrical-abstract idiom for which he is now known, in which the gestural and color-driven vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism is moderated and inflected by abstracted references to the New Mexican landscape. In 1974 he received the first solo exhibition ever given to a living artist by the New Mexico Museum of Art, and in 1975 his work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Art. Among his subsequent honors are the Mayor's Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts from the City of Santa Fe (1994), the United Nations Peace Rose presented by Sri Chinmoy of the United Nations Peace Meditation Group (1995), the 1997 thirty-year retrospective Sam Scott: An American Voice, Paintings 1967–1997 at the New Mexico Museum of Art, and his 2013 election as Artist of the Year by the Santa Fe Art Dealers Association. His work is collected internationally in the United States and Europe.