It can take over hundreds of hours to finish a quilt. To hold the quilt together, a repetitive pattern of stitches is applied to all three layers. Lastly, the stitched portrait is laid over soft batting and a backdrop cloth. Then, she continues her process by choosing textile materials, stacking them, and sewing them together with a sewing machine: a technique known as appliqué. She begins by expanding a photograph to life-size before sketching over it, separating light and dark sections. Butler, although a textile artist, adopts an interdisciplinary arts methodology, building upon works from iconic contemporary photographers such as Gordon Parks, Janette Beckman and Jamel Shabazz, who skillfully bestow a dignified aura to their subjects, within their work. Her fine art is a compilation of history, narrative building, visual art and material culture, stitched together in her quilts. The World is Yours is Butler’s ambitious message to upcoming African American generations to highlight the evils of slavery and inspire people to action. What results are stunning works that transform family memories and cultural practices into works of social statement.Colored Entrance (after Department Store, Mobile, Alabama by Gordon Parks, 1956), 2023, Cotton, silk, wool, velvet and lace quilted and appliquéd Image: Genevieve Hanson, Courtesy of Bisa Butler, and Jeffrey Deitch, New York Butler subverts this notion through her choice of motifs, embellishments, patterning and scale, all drawn from African textiles.
The constructed nature of the work with its reliance on piecing and stitching acknowledges the traditions of needlework normally associated with women and domesticity. African painted cotton and mud cloth tells the story of her ancestral homeland, vintage lace and aged satin might demonstrate the delicacy and refinement of times past while multi-colored organza and layered netting can convey a story of someone colorful and multifaceted. She creates a story around each image, and, in her choice of fabrics, she uses texture, color and the cultural origin of the cloth as part of a personal iconography that makes statements about society and identity. The vibrant portraits of African American life and the tales the quilts tell are largely based on photographs from which Butler takes inspiration. This experience of creating narrative and identity informs her quilts. As a child Butler had often spent time poring over black and white photographs with her grandmother, who told her stories about the people in each one. Her emergence as a quilt artist began humbly when, as a result of a fiber arts class taken at Howard University, she constructed a quilt for her dying grandmother mainly as a means of comfort.
Continuing with an aesthetic set in motion by artists such as Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold, Butler forges an individual and expressive signature style that draws upon her own cultural background and experiences. While quilts have historically been isolated in the history of art as the products of working women, Butler’s work not only acknowledges this tradition, but also reinvents it.
Butler, a formally trained African American artist of Ghanaian heritage, broaches the dividing line between creating with paints on canvas and creating with fiber by fashioning magnificent quilts and elevating a medium hitherto designated as craft into one that is clearly high art.
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