It’s About Time: Bisa Butler Reconstructs The Historical Narrative
At the end of 2019, Bisa Butler felt like she was building toward something important—that her quilted portraits were part of a larger idea just on the verge of coalescing. Hi-Fructose covered her in Volume 54 that year, but Butler is currently having a moment. She is leading a conversation. Over these three years, her work has become prolific within museum collections and has been featured in galleries and exhibitions across the country. From LACMA, to the Art Institute of Chicago, New York’s Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, and elsewhere.
The idea has coalesced and is still evolving. She is one of the most renowned portraitists in the United States, while her quilts have become the gravitational center of exhibitions, and a prize for collections across the country. “I am in the middle of a tremendous project,” says Butler, “although I feel like everything is a tremendous project.” As of recent, that project has her clocking twelve-hour days to meet an ambitious deadline for Art Basel. Hours wiled “in intense concentration” as she works away in her brand-new studio.
Butler’s dining room table served as her whole studio until just this year. A humble but crammed space for the fabric, thread, and myriad drawings that serve as her tools of creation. And lest we forget, her “beast,” the nickname for her double-handled, souped-up sewing machine. Butler’s beast looks more like the steering column of a Harley than the yellow-tinged, derelict Singer you find at a secondhand shop or garage sale.
I finally feel comfortable making quilts taller, wider, longer. Being in a dedicated space as opposed to my dining room, I can finally spread out. It has allowed me to dream bigger.”
We respond to fabrics without knowing it. There are the scents, the way they feel on your skin. You know instinctively if a fabric is something you would wear anytime or for a special occasion…”
The move to a new space is a fitting metaphor for the spot she has carved out of the zeitgeist. The general thrust of criticism and think pieces about her work focuses on just how incredible—even unbelievable—it is that Butler can stitch together high art from the dry, dusty, folksy medium of quilt making. She now creates in a space befitting what we (rightly or wrongly) think of as a prerequisite for the great artist. A place that can be closed off and protected from the peering and prodding of the rest of the world. Sure, Butler shares the studio with her husband, John, who uses a quarter or so of the space for his recording and DJ studio. But the rest houses Bisa and the beast. Butler says, “I finally feel comfortable making quilts taller, wider, longer. Being in a dedicated space as opposed to my dining room, I can finally spread out. It has allowed me to dream bigger.” The new work builds on this, veering toward a gargantuan scale. Butler is also experimenting with new fabrics as well. Holographics, faux fur, metallic fabrics, vinyl.
“Back in the day we called the clear vinyl ‘jellies.’ Like, you wore your jelly shoes,” she says. “These new fabrics are not necessarily a departure from my older work, but more of a delving deeper into what I’ve been doing. A further, different exploration. I am enjoying the fabrics that define now.”
This enlarges her world considerably. Butler has always created with a perfect instinct for how to pair fabrics with the vibe she is trying to convey. Silk evokes glamor, opulence, an ease with life. Wool, she tells us, is different—a different emotion. Wool makes her think of her father’s suits, her grandfather’s suits. Velvet is worn more now than in previous decades but it is still a luxury, a sign of high status. Lace is formal, and threadbare denim brings to mind hard work and sweat.
“We respond to fabrics without knowing it. There are the scents, the way they feel on your skin. You know instinctively if a fabric is something you would wear anytime or for a special occasion,” says Butler, “and these are some of the thoughts I keep in mind when I am creating a piece.”
Butler speaks tenderly of how she holds beloved the memories that work their way into fabric. She recalls the Muslim oils that infused hints of jasmine and rose into her mother’s fabrics. She revisits swatches from her grandmother’s extensive collection and there, even now, that soft floral scent. Fabric is lived in. Fabric stretches across our frame to embrace and shelter us. As Butler points out, that sixth sense to understand the warmth and texture of fabric crosses all borders, all languages, all divides.
In person, the gallery lights illume the warp and weft in Butler’s work and you can just sense how it would feel to nuzzle into the shoulder of the figure in her portrait. And just like we could collapse into the arms of a loved one, those who would hold and shelter us, the figures in Butler’s portraits feel just as safe and secure. Her art goes beyond the craft of quilt making, and the hundreds of hours she is famous for pouring into each piece.
Her deeper art is the capacity for finding and communicating dignity in others.
Butler says, “When you look at my work, you are looking at what I want to show you, and how I feel that Black people want to be seen. So, if you were to go into a home, and ask to see a family photo album, those are the type of photos you are going to see. Moments that people are proud of. Moments when they are happy and feeling good. You are not going to see the worst times in their life, the most painful moments. Those are not the moments I am interested in portraying. They are a part of life. They are real. They are honest. But there are also the parts of ourselves that we want to share. That is what I am sharing with my artwork.”
When you look at my work, you are looking at what I want to show you, and how I feel that black people want to be seen. So, if you were to go into a home, and ask to see a family photo album, those are the type of photos you are going to see. Moments that people are proud of.”
As Butler moves her artwork in new directions, the most radical change has occurred with regards to her inspiration. Photographs are still key to her process. “I could not do my work without photographs,” she says. As always, she begins with a photograph that moves her, that inspires that sense of dignity she brings to the final product. From there she creates a line drawing of the image to explore the values from the whitest whites to the darkest darks and every shade between. The sketch becomes her dressmaker’s pattern as she builds the fabrics of the quilt to create her signature sense of depth and illumination. The process remains the same, though the sources have shifted in a way that Butler considers fundamental.
For most of the last two decades that Butler has practiced quilting, the photographs that begin her process have mostly come from archives and databases. The vintage photos from these government and private collections sometimes featured famous faces (see “The Storm, the Whirlwind, and the Earthquake,” her portrayal of Frederick Douglass), but mostly we see folks whose faces have drifted through time: captured in a photograph, but anonymous.
So much of her practice has been devoted to researching these people. Sometimes Butler uncovers their life stories (as with her “Don’t Tread on Me, God Damn, Let’s Go!,” depicting a group of soldiers known as the Harlem Hellfighters), although sometimes the end of her research is an understanding of what people like the ones in the
photos might have lived like—their struggles and ambitions, their hopes, and their stumbling blocks.
“I’ve been experimenting lately with living photographers,” Butler says. “That is part of my new interest that started during the pandemic. As history was unfolding, these tragic events—all around us and right in front of me—I wanted to concentrate on the history I was in. So I decided that I wanted to create some works concentrating on photographers that were living in this century. It is incredibly rewarding for me to be able to speak to photographers whose work I have admired for years.”
These collaborators include the likes of Jamel Shabazz, Janette Beckman, and Malike Sidibe.
Butler continues, “Jamel Shabazz is a genius and a legend for me, as a person who grew up with hip hop. Being able to hear about their travels and experiences with their subjects has brought accuracy and relevance to my work that I wouldn’t be able to get before. I am able to choose fabrics that specifically reflect the life of the subjects, and of the photographers because of what they share with me. For instance, I’m now privy to information like the subjects’ names, occupations, and even personalities. Before I could take an educated guess but it is the difference between a fictional novel and a biography. One is based in fact and the other would be a realistic fiction.”
Working directly with these photographers also means that Butler is telling far more recent stories, focusing on the 1960s or so to present. And here we have the reason for all the new fabrics injected into her work. Different tools for different times. Polyesters for the ‘60s and lamés for the ‘70s. Faux fur for the climate-conscious eco-warrior. Holographics and metallics for the nuclear age. Fabrics that hint at how modern life has become synthetic, bombastic, and fully customized.
Whether Butler is looking into the deep past or the near present, her work has always featured undercurrents of autobiography. When it comes to the source material, she says, “Unconsciously, I am drawn to my family’s photos.”
One day her father pointed out that every image of a family always featured two daughters and one son. “I didn’t even notice until he pointed that out,” she says. This mirrors the exact makeup of Butler’s household from her youth, before her father remarried. “I recreate that a lot.”
Butler believes that the images she makes today reflect those images that she grew up alongside. The family portraits of her mother, father, and siblings. The snapshots from her grandmother’s photo album, which showed a thriving Black middle-class in New Orleans. Perhaps that helps explain her fascination with hardworking, blue-collar people, her urge to show them at their strongest, if not their happiest.
A black artist has a lot of power. We’re here now and I can create things that people want to look at.”
And for Butler, this art and her success is not just to celebrate her personal history, her family’s history, but also Black history. “A Black artist has a lot of power. We’re here now, and I can create things that people want to look at,” she says. She cites the hundreds of years of chattel slavery that the United States government cultivated in the Southern states until the Civil War, the decades of Jim Crow and segregation, the violence at Tulsa and Rosewood, and the continuing issues which still disproportionately plague Black communities, such as racism in healthcare, massive unemployment, and limited opportunities for education in urban centers.
“There was a lot of time when we as Black people did not have what we needed, and were not paid properly, were not educated properly, were not living in conditions fit for human beings, were not treated right, and now we are here. That has left an indelible mark. If I can do something to help my people,” says Butler, “by making someone feel proud to be Black, or makes someone feel strong or even if it just lets them know that they are worthwhile and cared for and human, then that is what I need to do.”
Whether portraying people of the past or present, of great fame or total anonymity, Bisa Butler brings the viewer face to face with images of dignity and grace. Her widening focus will ensure her work is richer, varied, and continues to offer surprises for an audience eager to revel before her quilted masterpieces.
Butler’s latest work will be on view at Art Basel, and then at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York starting next May. All of next year, in fact, is full of big moments for Butler. Alongside everything else, she is preparing for a big exhibit at a “big museum” in Washington, D.C. “It’s sort of not a secret, but it’s a secret,” she says. “I will be the first Black woman to have a solo show in this space. And definitely the first quilter. I am just excited about the future, and to debut my new work.”
This article was originally published in Hi-Fructose Issue 65. We have a few copies left here.
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