Ambreen Butt

Ambreen Butt (born 1969) is a Boston-based Pakistani American artist best known for her drawings, paintings, prints, and collages, and has been recognized for her labor intensive, painted self-portraits that portray feminist and political ideas through traditional Persian art. She now resides in Dallas, TX.

Education

Butt obtained her Bachelor’s of Fine Art in traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting from the National College of Arts in Lahore. She later moved to Boston in 1993 and in 1997 she received her Master’s of Fine Arts in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art (now Massachusetts College of Art and Design).

Art Butt's work is rooted in her bi-cultural identity and retains the intricate, decorative patterning that characterizes Indian and Persian miniature painting. One such work, I Am My Lost Diamond (2011), created for her Realms of Intimacy exhibition at the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, combined more than 20,000 sculpted fingers and toes cast in resin to create an image of fireworks or flower blossoms when viewed at a distance. The work was influenced by a friend's experience narrowly escaping from a suicide bombing in Butt's hometown of Lahore. One such social issue, as mentioned, is the differences between the depiction of males and females. In an interview, Butt explains this observation; “I was particularly struck by the representation of women in miniature art. They were often depicted as small seductive creatures. [Conversely,] The male icons [...] had a more god-like representation." “I was more concerned with the woman herself, rather than her body.”

Butt has also employed printmaking techniques in her work. Her 2008 series Dirty Pretty combines the techniques of etching, silkscreen, and lithography, while earlier untitled series combine etching and aquatint.

More recently, Butt's work has been featured on the exterior of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. The enlarged piece is a celebration of the heroism of Mukhtar Mai, a woman gang-raped at the order of her local council in an act of honor revenge. The U.S. State Department also commissioned a large-scale piece that now hangs in the U.S. embassy in Islamabad.

Awards In 1999, Butt received the inaugural James and Audrey Foster Prize from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Selected exhibition history Solo exhibitions 2003 - I Must Utter What Comes to My Lips, Worcester, Massachusetts, Worcester Art Museum, March 1 - May 11 2005 - I Need A Hero, Kustera Tilton Gallery, New York, June 23 - July 29, 2005 2019 - Mark My Words, National Museum for Women in the Arts, December 7, 2018 - April 14, 2019