Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016,[1][2] and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019,[3] Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch.

[5] In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth.

[7] Scott is renowned for her social commentary on issues such as racism, classism, sexism, violence, and cultural stereotypes,[8] as well as themes of spiritual healing.

[17] Her works, Yellow #4 and Birth of Mammy #4, were acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Renwick Gallery's 50th Anniversary Campaign.

Included were selections (partly inspired by her mother's stories and work as a nanny) from Scott's Mammy/Nanny series (1986-1991) in which she used glass beads and leather to create racial and value distinctions.

The exhibition was called "Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art in Charleston" and each artist was invited to select an outdoor site and create a piece that conveyed their sense of the city's community history.

Beneath them she constructed a funeral pyre from 500 logs and a figure dying, or a Phoenix, to represent "the end of slavery or the beginning of a new era, Reconstruction.

[22] Curator Jean-Edith Weiffenbach noted that Scott, "challenged by that exhibition's revelations of the impact of African traditions on Western art, belief systems, and social customs [...] fashioned a reply that uses a contemporary hybrid of craft vocabularies from several cultures in an allegorical language that confronts stereotypes as well as issues of representation and perception.

[23] "At the entrance to the exhibition space sat Rodin's Thinker, an icon of Western art; above the statue's head Scott suspended a beaded figure hung by the neck by chains and covered with racial epithets.

The exhibition includes sculpture, jewelry, textiles, artwear garments, performance compilations, prints, and mixed-media installations.

When the Baltimore City Parks Board refused to desegregate its pools despite a highly publicized drowning in a nearby river in 1953, the NAACP filed a lawsuit and eventually won on appeal.