Thank you for reading! You may have noticed that my profile picture is an American flag whose stars and stripes have fallen off and are now lying at the bottom. What do you think? Would you consider Bisa Butler’s quilts “art”? Do they “say something” to you? And if you scroll all the way to the bottom of that blog, you’ll find an uplifting musical reflection to go along with Bisa Butler’s visual reflections on African American identity. You can click on any of the images below, or follow this link to visit the WantNot Studio blog, where you can read a little more about Bisa Butler and see plenty more photographs of her swoon-worthy pieces. When I first started making quilts and portraits, everything fit into place and I knew I was saying something. She knew that doing something completely different, creating in a way that hadn't been done before, venturing into territory that was new not only to her as an individual but to the worlds of portraiture, quilting, and art in general, was a good thing: April 8th, 2021.īut Butler didn’t let that stop her. "Bisa Butler Exhibition At Art Institute Of Chicago Headlines National Recognition Of Quilting." Forbes Magazine. One of the criticisms somebody told me was, ‘I just don't know where you fit in.’ I remember them looking at my portfolio and saying, ‘You're not a portraitist like the painters who are popular right now and you're not a quilter in the traditional sense either you don't have the abstraction and the geometric lines of traditional African American quilting, so I don’t know where you fit in.'
While taking the artistic plunge - not only in a new-to-her medium but also in creating a hitherto unseen style and technique - felt very natural for Butler, who quickly felt at home among fabric scraps in a way she never had around paints and canvas, it wasn’t an easy road to recognition or acceptance from the art world: Her first quilted piece - Francis and Violette - was inspired by her grandparents’ old wedding photograph and worked up in shades of violet, a color linked to her grandmother’s name. She had been taught the basics of sewing as a young girl by her family, but it wasn’t until her grandmother fell ill and Butler began casting around for an idea of something she could make as a gift to to show her grandmother love in her final days that she discovered her skill for quilting, as well as a deep affinity for the craft that she’d never experienced with painting. In fact, she originally trained as a painter and then as an art teacher. Bisa Butler’s forceful life-size quilted portraits of both famous and unidentified African-American men, women, and children have been splashed across scores of printed and digital newspaper and magazines, featured in more than a dozen solo exhibitions, and showcased in prestigious collections at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and many more places besides.īut Bisa Butler never actually set out to become a quilter or a textile artist of any kind.
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