Mention the word "quilting" and most of us will conjure up in our minds a wonderful traditional craft, and quilts with intricate and colourful geometrical figures that have also provided through the decades intriguing inspirations for fashion collections. Yet Bisa Butler's definition of quilting is very personal and imaginative, as proved by her colourful textile portraits.
Born in Orange, NJ, the African American artist of Ghanaian heritage studied Fine Art and then started working as an art teacher and painter.
A Fiber Arts class at Howard University helped her finding an innovative path, reinventing a creative process that allowed her to combine her passion for painting, her love of portraits and photo albums and the sewing skills she had acquired as a child from her mother and grandmother.
A quilt she made for her dying grandmother and her childhood memories of looking at pictures with her and listening to the stories of the people portrayed in the images, finally prompted her to switch from paintings to fabric compositions.
Butler started with relatively small portraits that framed the face and the shoulders of a subject, but her works quickly expanded and she now creates large textile paintings incorporating several subjects, in which she employs fabrics instead of paint and the sewing machine as if it were a brush.
You could definitely consider her artworks as textile paintings since, while the technique behind them is essentially taken from quilting, Butler uses different colours of fabrics and different materials, such cotton, velvet, wool and silk, to create hyperreal images with varied nuances and playing with lights and shadows.
The starting point for her artwork is usually a black and white archival image, showing famous or anonymous characters, such as Basquiat, Josephine Baker, a stylish couple, a group of Harlem girls or of dapper sapeurs. One of her biggest pieces is entitled "To Truth and God" and it is inspired by a 1899 picture of the Morris Brown College baseball team.
There is a main difference between the early pieces Butler created and these new ones: the latter have become more nuanced and defined and the artist also employs in them a wider variety of textiles and in particular traditional African fabrics often from Butler's personal archive.
Fabrics are important on two levels: they create visually striking effects with their bold and clashing colours and contrastingly mesmerising textures (Butler often uses flower patterned fabrics in ingeniously clever ways to create the hair of her characters), connecting the artworks to the realm of fashion and style, and they point at strong symbolisms and at the narratives behind African fabrics (as you may remember from a previous post, a pattern covered in swallows represents a symbol of good luck, but also hints at the process of asking for a favour, while in Ghana the print refers to the transience of riches and to the fact that you may be rich today and poor tomorrow since money has wings and can fly away...).
Money prints hint at slavery, while the jumping horse fabric on the socks of some of the characters in "To Truth and God" it is called "I run faster than my enemies" in the Côte d'Ivoire and it pays homage to the spirit of the young men portrayed.
Besides, there are other meanings being specific textiles as vintage fabrics such as lace and satin point at an elegance gone by, while layered multi-coloured organza and netting are used by the artist to portray a multifaceted character.
Quilting is a craft usually made by women, but it has also got connections with the African-American tradition: slaves would make quilts for themselves and their owners. In the children's story Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt (1989) slaves used quilts as a means to share and transmit secret messages to escape slavery and travel the Underground Railroad. In the history of quilt-making the quilts of Gee's Bend, an Alabama-based all-black community known for this craft, also have a very special place.
In Butler's art quilting is transformed into a complex art form that also allows the artist to display a fashion sensibility and an environmental consciousness: from the way she dresses her characters you easily realise Butler has got a peculiar personal style, while employing in some of the artworks discarded fabrics is an important statement that adds another layer and meaning to the portraits.
Butler is currently represented by Claire Oliver Gallery, but her big break may come next year: in March 2020 the Katonah Museum of Art (KMA) will dedicate a first solo museum exhibition ("Bisa Butler: Portraits") to the artist's current work and will feature approximately 25 of her vivid and larger-than-life quilts that capture African American identity and culture.
The exhibition will then travel to Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in September 2020. But before then you can bet that Butler will be offered to collaborate with a fashion house: the more you look at her works, the more you can see her portraits of fierce and strong characters in their bold and bright attires being featured in a fashion collection.
Image credits for this post
Bisa Butler, Broom Jumpers, quilted and appliquéd cotton, wool and chiffon, 2019
Bisa Butler, Broom Jumpers (detail), quilted and appliquéd cotton, wool and chiffon, 2019
Bisa Butler, I Am Not Your Negro, 2019
Bisa Butler, Les Sapeurs, cotton and silk, 2018
Bisa Butler, To God And Truth - detail, cotton, silk chiffon, satin, silk and lace, 2019
Bisa Butler, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (work in progress), quilted and appliquéd cotton, wool and chiffon, 2019
Bisa Butler, Black Star Family, first class tickets to Liberia (detail), cotton, silk chiffon, satin, silk and lace, 2018
Bisa Butler, The Mighty Gents, quilted and appliquéd cotton, wool and chiffon, 2018
Bisa Butler, The Safety Patrol, quilted and appliquéd cotton, wool and chiffon, 2018
Bisa Butler, Dear Mama, quilted and appliquéd cotton, wool and chiffon, 2019
Bisa Butler, Four Little Girls, September 15, 1963, cotton, silk and lace netting, 2018
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