Fiber Artist Bisa Butler Paints With Fabric To Create Quilted Black Masterpieces
If you weren’t aware, CISED is not only about “Celebrating Ill Shit Every Day, but also approaches art from a consumer perspective. If I’m moved to buy it (even if I can’t afford it), I’ll big it up here. The subject of this blog post definitely makes work that I’d love to own myself because it’s so fucking awesome.
One day a while ago while scrolling Instagram, I came across what I thought were vibrant paintings of Black people using vivid patterns and colors. To my surprise, when I read the caption, they were not paintings, but quilts made solely of fabrics such as cotton, silk, wool, leather, denim and velvet, quilted and appliqued. Looking at the images again, I wondered what kind of sorcery went into creating such realistic figures out of different colors and patterns. She pretty much paints with fabric and it’s truly amazing.
The quilts are the work of New Jersey fiber artist Bisa Butler and she truly has the eye. As I looked further into her history, I was delighted to learn that she was educated at Howard University, where I went to school (I graduated from Penn State. Long story). She received an undergraduate degree from Howard in Fine Art, and judging from my own experience, I know her experience at the Mecca was integral in her decision to dedicate her work to Blackness. Butler would go on to get her master’s in Art Education from Montclair State University in 2004. Montclair was where she was introduced to fiber art after taking a course in it.
She had been sewing her whole life and the lessons she learned at Howard and Montclair would direct her work. “I quilt because this was the technique that was taught to me at home. I could sew before I ever painted on a canvas,” partially reads Butler’s artist statement. “My grandmother and mother while not quilters, sewed garments almost every day. African Americans have been quilting since we were bought to this country and needed to keep warm. Enslaved people were not given large pieces of fabric and had to make do with the scarps of cloth that were left after clothing wore out. From these scraps the African American quilt aesthetic came into being. Some enslaved peoples were so talented that they were tasked for creating beautiful quilts that adorned their enslavers beds. My own pieces are reminiscent of this tradition, but I use African fabrics from my father’s homeland of Ghana, batiks from Nigeria, and prints from South Africa. My subjects are adorned with and made up of the cloth of our ancestors. If these visages are to be recreated and seen for the first time in a century, I want them to have their African Ancestry back, I want them to take their place in American History. I want the viewer to see the subjects as I see them.”
Her work has featured widely in exhibits from the Smithsonian to the Epcot Center. Her pieces are included in permanent collections at The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Art Boston, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Kemper Museum of Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Mount Holyoke Museum of Art, to name a few. In 2017, she signed on to be represented by the Claire Oliver Gallery in New York. In March, her quilted portrait of Wangari Maathai (environmental activist, women’s rights activist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize) was featured on the cover of TIME Magazine for its 100 Women Of The Year edition.
In place of representational color, Butler uses jewel tones to craft her masterpieces. The individuals in the quilted portraits are either key figures in Black history (Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jackie Robinson, Frederick Douglass, Josephine Baker) or people captured in old photos. She carefully chooses fabrics that reflect each individual’s life and captures their spirits in time. Sometimes, she’ll use clothes worn by the subject as material. “I create portraits of people that include clues of their inner thoughts, their heritage, their actual emotions, and even their future,” Butler told the Museum of the African Diaspora. “I represent all of my figures with dignity and regal opulence because that is my actual perspective of humanity. I use West African wax printed fabric, kente cloth, and Dutch wax prints to communicate that all of my figures are of African descent and have a long and rich history behind them. I choose bright technicolor cloth to represent our skin because these colors are how African Americans refer to our complexions.”
Check out some of Bisa Butler’s quilts below. This year, she will be the subject of two solo exhibitions this year (considering the current COVID-19 crisis). “Bisa Butler: Portraits” is running from March 15 to June 14, 2020 at the Katonah Museum of Art, New York and at the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois September 5, 2020 to January 24, 2021. Seeing some of these masterpieces in person is definitely on my bucket list.
Bisa Butler can be followed on Instagram at @bisabutler.
(All images used in this post are credited to the Claire Oliver Gallery)
THIS IS THE ONE I WANT!!!
