Bisa Butler

Bisa Butler (born 1973, Orange, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American fibre artist whose vivid, life-size quilted portraits of Black individuals reimagine the medium and the genre. Working from contemporary and historical photographs, Butler recreates the scenes, animating the subjects using unique blends of colourful, patterned, and textured fabrics. Her work sits with those of influential textile artists, such as Faith Ringgold, Harriet Powers, and the artists of Gee’s Bend, and has also been compared to the work of contemporary Black artists who are transforming portraiture, including Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald. Butler describes her work as “a quilted photo album…of a Black diaspora family.”

Early life and career

Butler was born Mailissa Yamba Butler and was the youngest of four siblings. Her elder sister could not pronounce her name, so Butler went by “Bisa” thereafter. She and her family lived in South Orange, New Jersey. Her father was a college president, born in Ghana, and her mother, originally from New Orleans and raised in Morocco, was a French teacher.

Butler attended Howard University, Washington, D.C., where she studied painting under the artists Ernie Barnes, Elizabeth Catlett, and Lois Mailou Jones. She also worked with Jeff Donaldson, who was one of the founders of AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), a collective of African American artists that formed in 1968 in Chicago. The collective’s aim to empower and unite the African diaspora deeply influenced Butler’s approach to creating art. Butler said of their impact:

“This entire philosophy is part of the [AfriCOBRA] art group….This art is not just to look nice, this art is a tool to spread awareness that Black is beautiful and Black people should have access to the art community, and feel worthwhile when looking at art….You’ll still see this aesthetic in my work….I want my art to stand for something, and to do something to help Black people, to show what a real Black person is like.”

While at Howard University, Butler began incorporating collage techniques, adding fabric to her paintings. She graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (1995) and later enrolled in the teaching program at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Although Butler’s mother and grandmother had taught her sewing, she was introduced to quilting in a fibre arts course. About this time, Butler made her first quilt (Francis and Violette [Grandparents] [2001]) using a vintage portrait of her grandparents on their wedding day as inspiration.

Quilted portraits

Butler completed a master’s degree in teaching in 2005 and began a career as an educator. For 13 years, she taught high-school art classes while working on quilts in her spare time. The medium proved a pragmatic choice—oil paint and thinners were too toxic for Butler to use while she was pregnant and after her daughter was born. She exhibited her work, which initially featured only her family and friends, in churches and community centres. Butler eventually found representation with Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, and began to increase the scale of her quilts and to expand her subjects to include both influential and unnamed figures from archival photographs, all of whom are Black.

Butler’s quilts can take hundreds of hours to make. Once she chooses a photograph from which to work, she enlarges it so that her subjects become life-size. She then layers cotton, silk, velvet, wool, and other fabrics, frequently incorporating West African printed fabric, kente cloth, and Dutch wax prints to emphasize that her subjects are of African descent. Butler selects specific patterns to suggest the individuals’ lifestyles and heritage. For example, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (2019)—the subjects of which are taken from a 19th-century photo of four Black women students at Atlanta University, Georgia—Butler uses the Vlisco Dutch wax fabric pattern “Speed Bird” to represent freedom and prosperity. Her subjects are further humanized when the quilts are installed, usually at eye level, as if creating a dialogue with the viewer “about age-old issues, still problematic in our culture, through the comforting, embracing medium of the quilt.”

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Butler’s titles often reference influential works and quotes, which, in addition to Maya Angelou’s 1969 autobiography, include the 2016 documentary based on an unpublished manuscript by James Baldwin (I Am Not Your Negro [2019]), and Frederick Douglass’s so-called Fifth of July speech (1852) (The Storm, the Whirlwind, and the Earthquake [2020]). Butler has also paired music with her portraits, notably for her first solo exhibition, “Bisa Butler: Portraits,” at the Art Institute of Chicago. Butler and her husband, John, created a playlist to accompany her quilts as well as other works in the museum.

Exhibitions and recent work

Although Butler has made quilts for decades, she was not well known until “Portraits” garnered her international attention. She has since exhibited elsewhere in the United States, as well as in China, England, Japan, and South Africa. Her quilts have been acquired by many institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. More recently, Butler has collaborated with contemporary photographers and artists to create portraits of more modern, notable figures, such as members of the hip-hop group Salt-N-Pepa and actor Chadwick Boseman.