Please join us for a talk with Bisa Butler, an award winning African American textile artist. Bisa is known for her vibrantly stunning larger than life sized quilted portraits that captivate viewers around the world. Through her dynamic, celebratory quilted portraits of people of African descent, Bisa Butler (b. 1973, Orange, NJ) investigates the purposes and potential of portraiture within the Black historical narrative. Butler’s influences range widely from personal family scrapbooks to American folk traditions and AfriCOBRA philosophies. Although her finished works are made entirely of textiles, Butler approaches the medium from a painterly perspective. Sourcing imagery mainly from photographs, she uses layered fabrics and quilting to create unique compositions , psychological depth and detailed textures that she found missing from her paintings. By returning to textiles, Butler has reconnected with her family’s history since it was her grandmother and mother who taught her to sew.

Be sure to see Bisa Butler’s website, which includes an art portfolio, Educator’s Resources, and much more.

BIO

Bisa Butler is the daughter of a college president and a French teacher. She was raised in South Orange as the youngest of four siblings. Butler’s artistic talent was first recognized at the age of four, when she won a blue ribbon in an art competition. Formally trained, Butler graduated Cum Laude from Howard University with a Bachelor’s in Fine Art degree.  It was during her education at Howard that Butler was able to refine her natural talents under the tutelage of lecturers such as Lois Mailou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, Jeff Donaldson and Al Smith Jr.It was at this time that she began to experiment with fabric as a medium and became interested in collage techniques. Butler went on to earn a Master’s in Art from Montclair State University in 2005. While in the process of obtaining her Master’s degree, Butler took a Fiber Arts class where she had an artistic epiphany and she finally realized how to express her art.  “As a child, I was always watching my mother and grandmother sew, and they taught me. After that class, I made a portrait quilt for my grandmother on her deathbed, and I have been making art quilts ever since.” Butler was a high school art teacher for 10 years in the Newark Public Schools and three years at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey.

In 2022, Bisa Butler was awarded a Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship and will be exhibiting in Switzerland during Art Basel this coming June with the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. She was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Bloomfield College this past May. Butler’s work was the focus of a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, the second stop of a traveling exhibit which began at the Katonah Museum of Art. Many institutions and museums have acquired Butler’s work including: The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Perez Museum of Miami, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Nelson-Atkins Museum, 21cMuseum Hotels, The Kemper Museum of Art, The Orlando Museum of Art, The Newark Museum, The Toledo Museum of Art, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Hunter Museum of American Art and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This event is organized by the Teachers College Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study and co-sponsored by the Gottesman Libraries.

Register HERE.

Where: 306 Russell / Online