The philosophy of the collective was to express a Black aesthetic in their art that was rooted in community effort and positive revolutionary ideas. AfriCobra (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) is an African American artists collective founded in 1968. He was the Dean of Fine Arts and one of the founders of AfriCobra. Jeff Donaldson especially had a big influence on her work. She was largely influenced by her lecturers, including Ernie Barnes, Elizabeth Catlett, and Jeff Donaldson. Her education at Howard University played a massive role in shaping Butler’s view of the world and her approach to her art. Butler was highly influenced by the lectures she received at the university by acclaimed Black artists, such as Lois Mailou Jones. Hereafter, she attended Howard University and graduated with a Cum Laude in Fine Arts. Butler is the youngest child of four and since preschool, she thoroughly enjoyed art.īisa attended Columbia High School and graduated in 1991. Her mother influenced her as an African American French teacher, and her father as a Ghanaian college president. Butler grew up in a household with an interesting cultural influence. The subheadings below detail some of the important events and influences that shaped Butler’s successful career.īisa Butler was born in 1973 in Orange, New Jersey. Since then, Bisa Butler’s biography has started to grow at a surprising rate. Date of Birthīisa Butler has been making quilted artworks since the 1990s, but it is only in her mid 40’s that she started receiving critical acclaim for her work. Through her powerful meticulous work, she embeds these figures with colors of beauty and dignity, and in the process, she pulls them out of the past and into life again. Many of her references are based on archival photographs, often in sepia or grayscale. The people in her work that she recreates in technicolor, range from well-known figures to ordinary people who are often overlooked. She describes her work as a “quilted photo album” that resembles a “Black diaspora family”. She uses fabric and stitching in the way a painter explores the mixing and use of different colors and paints. Her bold use of color and textile in her unique portraits, makes her work instantly recognizable as Bisa Butler quilts. 6.2 Why Is Bisa Butler’s Work So Large?īisa Butler is a New Jersey-born fiber artist who currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.6.1 What Gallery Represents Bisa Butler?.5.2 Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement (2021) by Tarana Burke.5.1 Bisa Butler: Portraits (2020) By Erica Warren.3.3 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (2019).1 Artist in Context: Who Is Bisa Butler?.Butler brings African and African American people to the fore of her works, telling their past and present stories in inventive and visually striking ways that focus attention on both their individuality and a collective, historical narrative. Butler’s works also recall the narrative quilts of Faith Ringgold, and she counts Gordon Parks’s poignant photographs of African American life and Romare Bearden’s paper collages as major influences. Time spent with her grandmother looking at family photographs informed this practice, and Butler has a certain inherent familiarity with fabric, as her mother and grandmother used to sew and make clothing. She composes each figure individually before stitching them together as the final step in the process. Butler’s father was Ghanaian, and she sources many of her fabrics from Ghana, carefully choosing the prints based on how she wants to convey the identity of the people in her works. For this quilt and her other works, Butler typically starts with a photograph as her inspiration, isolating areas of light and dark within the image and adapting it into a collage of layered fabric. Butler’s artistic process is time- and labor-intensive- The Safety Patrol took a staggering 400 hours to create.
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