Deonte Scott is turning nearly two decades of his own poetry into something people can walk through.
On August 29, he will debut “The Wall Speaks,” an immersive spoken-word, music, and visual art experience at MATCH, Midtown Arts & Theater Center Houston, where his poems are paired with physical installations that guests can see, touch, and hear read back in his own voice.
Much of the show’s imagery draws from Scott’s own path, from the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, where he grew up, to the Houston stages where he has spent nearly two decades building an audience.
He didn’t discover poetry until he left home for college, transferring from the University of Iowa to a junior college, where he came across “Def Poetry Jam” and started experimenting with his own voice. What began as poems about love and heartbreak eventually gave way to something rawer when he grew tired of writing about the same subject and pushed himself toward different material.
“I haven’t seen a poet or a spoken word artist do an art gallery that has physical installations of their poems,” Scott said. “Every piece in the gallery works the same way, paired with a QR code that lets visitors scan and hear me read the poem aloud myself.”
“A Struggle Is Real” is a poem Scott wrote about unemployment. Its opening line describes eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In the gallery, that poem becomes an old coffee table stacked with past-due bills, open jars of peanut butter and jelly, and a half-eaten sandwich, beside a sketched portrait of the man in it. The idea comes from behaviors that people naturally exhibit.
“A lot of our darkest moments are when we’re alone in a room,” Scott said. “And that wall sees everything. It hears everything. It hears your cries, it hears your joy.”
He built his name the way most creatives do, one room at a time. Open mics, church programs, coffee shops, and even a funeral. It didn’t matter. He would perform anywhere. That grind eventually earned him his first TV credit, a slot on Season 4 of TV One’s “Lexus Verses & Flow,” alongside musical guests Leela James and Anthony Hamilton.
He went on to produce his own shows, including 2017’s “Damage Control,” staged in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Then he got married, had a child, and stepped back from the stage he had spent a decade building. “The Wall Speaks” marks his return after nearly six years away.
Holly Charles-Pearson has watched that arc unfold. The Houston author and NAACP Image Award-nominated filmmaker met Scott around 2012, when the two were still finding their footing as young Black artists in the city, trading ideas about how to push past imposter syndrome and get their work in front of an audience. More than a decade later, she still considers him one of the most honest performers she’s watched.
“Even though he’s a performer, his work is not performative,” Charles-Pearson said. “He’s such an open book. When you watch him perform, it’s almost like he’s giving you access to a personal diary.”
That openness, she said, is rarer than people realize, especially from a Black man willing to talk publicly about pain.
“In our community, particularly when it comes to men, there is a shying away from admitting you need help, admitting you’re vulnerable,” Charles-Pearson said. “Deonte does the work for the audience by putting himself out there. While it’s so widely needed, it shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is, because no one else is brave enough to do it.”
Scott carries that same instinct into the rest of his life. Alongside his art, he runs the nonprofit Run for Autism, which he started five years ago after his nephew was diagnosed. He used to raise money each year through a 10K near Daikin Park, donating the proceeds to another nonprofit, before deciding it was time to build something of his own.
“I want people to see and learn from my journey because I’ve had a lot of struggles. It built a lot of character. I wouldn’t change it. It’s made me who I am.”
Deonte Scott, Spoken Word Artist
He has also released a memoir-poetry collection, “The Beauty in the Burden,” and two poetry EPs, “The Struggle” and “Damage Control”. Each one pulled from something he actually lived.
The gallery at MATCH ends the same way Scott hopes his story does, with release. Three large boards make up what he calls the healing wall, where guests are invited to write down whatever they came in carrying and are ready to leave behind.
“I want people to see and learn from my journey because I’ve had a lot of struggles,” Scott said. “It built a lot of character. I wouldn’t change it. It’s made me who I am.”
