Bisa Butler: Portraits, an exhibition featuring twenty-two of the artist’s arresting portrait quilts, opened at the Art Institute of Chicago on November 16, 2020. Although the Art Institute had to close (due to the pandemic) shortly thereafter, everyone is welcome to visit the exhibition webpage to hear from the artist and listen to the playlist, a collaboration between the artist and her husband John. The exhibition catalogue is available through the museum shop.
Bisa Butler’s portrait quilts vividly capture personal and historical narratives of Black life. Her earliest portraits feature family members and friends, but the limitations of this focus led her to explore other sources for her work. She began to research ways to expand her practice and looked to open source archives to find photographs featuring individuals often excluded from or marginalized within dominant, whitewashed narratives of history. Although the names and details of these individuals’ lives typically are unrecorded, these subjects find new life through Butler’s work.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, named after Maya Angelou’s 1969 memoir, exemplifies Butler’s effort to illuminate remarkable, yet often overlooked individuals, and to suggest the contemporary resonance of their stories. Butler based this work on an 1899 or 1900 photograph of four women seated on the steps of Atlanta University in Georgia. Although the artist does not know the women’s names, she recognizes the profound relevance of their experience. To attend college during the Jim Crow era and well before women—especially Black women—had voting rights in the United States, these women had to be confident and resilient. Butler conveyed this fortitude in their eyes as well as their posture; she shows them literally leaning in, unabashedly advocating for themselves well before it became fashionable or newsworthy.
Butler employs the longstanding technique of appliqué quiltmaking to create her evocative portraits. She begins with the figures, forming them by precisely cutting, layering, and pinning together a variety of fabrics and then arranging these vibrant forms on a patterned ground, forming the quilt top. Butler then sandwiches a layer of soft batting (a fiber stuffing) between the quilt top and a backing fabric and stitches the layers together; the fluid lines of thread give the work structure and texture. Butler also uses thread to accentuate details such as the children’s slouching socks in The Safety Patrol. Butler’s approach to appliqué resembles the multimedia collage technique that artists such as Romare Bearden used to create works with dimension and layers of meaning, incorporating fabric, paper, and other media. Butler chooses materials that reinforce her works’ narratives. For example, in The Warmth of Other Sons, a portrait showing a family newly arrived in Chicago, Butler evoked the family’s path from the rural South to a northern city in the fabrics of the father’s clothes. His shirt front features a textile printed with a stylized log cabin set against plowed fields, while his pants are composed of a fabric depicting a multistory building.
The exhibition also situates Butler’s work alongside that of her artistic predecessors, including Barbara Jones-Hogu and Nelson Stevens of AfriCOBRA (the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, an artists’ collective established in Chicago in the late 1960s), and photographer Gordon Parks. In 1970 Jeff Donaldson, a founding member of AfriCOBRA moved to Washington, DC, to chair the art department at Howard University; while studying there, Butler steeped herself in the collective’s socially conscious, Afrocentric philosophy.
Nelson Stevens’s painting Towards Identity exemplifies the group’s focus on the human figure, use of bright Kool-Aid colors, and play between representation and abstraction. Similarly, Butler’s work I Am Not Your Negro explores ways to envision Black experiences while experimenting with abstraction, color, and pattern. With her work, Butler, like Gordon Parks, offers a broad view of humanity and highlights scenes of everyday life, in Parks’s words, “to keep the record straight pictorially.” Butler’s close ties to her family have also influenced her practice. As a young girl, she spent hours paging through family photo albums with her grandmother, who shared the stories behind the pictures. This experience gave Butler an appreciation for photography and its documentary and narrative potential, which Butler harnesses and magnifies in her work. Photographs serve as the starting point for her compositions, and through her choice of subjects, materials, and titles, she layers narratives into her portraits and invites viewers to question who gets documented and why.
Bisa Butler: Portraits is co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Katonah Museum of Art.
Dr. Erica Warren is associate curator of Textiles at the Art Institute of Chicago. For more details regarding recent exhibitions and publications, please visit ericawarrenphd.com.
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