Bisa Butler

Bisa Butler (born Mailissa Yamba Butler in 1973) is an African American fiber artist who is credited with creating a new genre of quilting, using photographs, sketches, and vivid traditional textiles to create vibrant life-size portraits in fabric. She is known for celebrating Black life and identity, portraying both everyday people and notable historical figures.

Butler's works have been exhibited widely and are in the permanent collections of museums including the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture,

Early life and education Bisa Butler, born Mailissa Yamba Butler, was born in Orange, New Jersey, grew up in South Orange, and graduated from Columbia High School in 1991. Her mother is a French teacher from New Orleans and her father, a college president, was born in Ghana. The youngest child in her family, Butler had three siblings.

Butler majored in fine art and graduated cum laude from Howard University, attended lectures by prominent black artists such as Lois Mailou Jones, and studied under lecturers such as Elizabeth Catlett, Her undergraduate degree was in painting, but she has stated that she never really connected with the medium. She did start working with fabric, making collages on canvas. both she and her professor recognized it as an entirely new form of quilting.

Butler explained her art practice in a 2023 interview with Art & Object magazine:

Erica Warren of the Art Institute of Chicago has commented that: quote|"The vibrancy and scale of Butler's work really captivates viewers, and once they are pulled in, they experience an often startling realization regarding materiality; that is, they discover what they are looking at is fabric rather than paint." She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Artistry

Patternmaster (2023), is a portrait of Octavia E. Butler on display in the National Portrait Gallery Through her quilts, Butler aims to "tell stories that may have been forgotten over time." Butler often uses kente cloth and African wax printed fabrics in her quilts, so her subjects are "adorned with and made up of the cloth of our ancestors."

Butler's quilts both heavily incorporate African textiles a well as expand on a rich African American quilting tradition. She explains in her artist statement:

Butler typically works in bright jewel tones rather than representational colors to depict skin tone. Using the Kool-Aid colors of the Black Power art movement also serves to capture the "soul and energy" of the person Butler is depicting. While at Howard, Butler was mentored by members of AfriCOBRA. The artist collective's bright, colorful aesthetic and aim to create positive representations of Black Americans can be found in Butler's body of work, as well. Jackie Robinson, and Frederick Douglass. Butler uses a variety of patterned fabrics, which she carefully selects to reflect the subject's life, sometimes using clothing worn by the subject. Her portrait of Nina Simone, for example, is made of cotton, silk, velvet, and netting, whereas her portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat is made of leather, cotton, and vintage denim.

Along with her portraits of notable figures, Butler also creates pieces featuring everyday, unknown African American subjects that she bases on found photographs. She describes her fascination for her nameless subjects' unknown stories: "I feel these people; I know these stories because I have grown up with them my whole life." She strives "to bring as many of these unnamed peoples photos to the forefront" so "people will see these ordinary folks as deserving of a spotlight too."

Her work, Harlem Hellfighters, was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Renwick Gallery's 50th Anniversary Campaign. This work is Butler's largest quilt to date, measuring approximately 11 x 13 feet, and features nine life-sized figures.

Butler has worked on commission to create a number of magazine covers, including the Fall 2020 cover of Juxtapoz, the March 2020 cover of Time Magazine honoring Wangari Maathai, the 2020 Time magazine "Person of the Year" image of Porche Bennett-Bey and the May/June 2021 edition of Essence magazine. Tarana Burke's memoir sports a cover image quilted by Butler. Additionally, Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN)'s included Butler's work in its "Juneteenth Artist Showcase".

In 2018, Butler exhibited at EXPO Chicago and was praised in Newcity and the Chicago Reader. In February 2019, her work was included along with that of Romare Bearden in The Art of Jazz, a Black History Month exhibition in Morristown, New Jersey. Butler's quilts are featured in art books such as Journey of Hope: Quilts Inspired by President Barack Obama (2010) and Collaborations: Two Decades of African American Art : Hearne Fine Art 1988-2008 (2008). In 2019, she was a finalist for the Museum of Art and Design's Burke Prize.

Butler's first solo museum exhibition Bisa Butler: Portraits was co-organized between the Art Institute of Chicago and the Katonah Museum of Art. It was scheduled to first open at the Katonah Museum of Art from March 15 to June 14, 2020; however, after temporarily closing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition was extended to October 4, 2020.

From May 13, 2022 to April 2, 2023, Butler's quilt Harlem Hellfighters

From November 17, 2022 to March 12, 2023, the Skirball Cultural Center presented Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories, an exhibition with works by more than forty artists, including Bisa Butler.

From May 6, 2023 to June 30, 2023, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery presented Butler's quilt exhibition: The World Is Yours.

Public collections

21c Museum of Art, Louisville, Kentucky Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), San Francisco, California Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota Museum of Arts and Design, New York Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri Newark Museum of Art, Newark, New Jersey Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, Florida Smithsonian American Art Museum Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio