Artistic Process and Innovation in Bisa Butler’s Portraits

Bisa Butler is an American artist who uses quilting and textile arts to create detailed portraits of historical figures, her family members, and others. Her work explores themes of migration and family within the Black American experience, and her choice to quilt is informed in part by its history as a marginalized craft with history in the Black community. 

Last spring, I visited Butler’s first solo exhibition at the Art Institute and was struck by her work in a way I hadn’t been in a long time. In studying the process and personal characteristics common in creative people this semester, I’ve been able to identify some of the specific ways her work stands out in her field and why it was so compelling. By developing an expertise in painting, collecting elements of its style, and applying them to quilting, Butler established a new kind of portraiture which uniquely captures human figures and scenes in textile form. Her innovative process has created a paradigm shift in her field by bringing the form of quilting into the sphere of fine art. 

Her expertise and education as an artist heavily inform the way she engages with her craft, in particular because she has collected specific techniques from other art forms and applied them to quilting to transform the effect a textile piece can have. Butler is trained in painting, which she studied extensively as an undergraduate at Harvard and uses painting techniques in her fabric art. For example, she uses shading to give more depth to her portraits by applying several different shades of fabric together the way you would apply strokes on a canvas while adding white or black, saying, “I’m doing the same thing, but I’m doing it with fabric” (Q&A with Bisa Butler). You can see how she uses this painting technique to create dimension in the subject’s face in a part of her 2019 quilt Dear Mama. 

In another borrowed technique that hasn’t traditionally been used in quilting, Butler layers pieces upon pieces of fabric to create more complex images. “The pieces are not put together like a jigsaw puzzle,” she explains, adding, “it’s layer upon layer, like a topographical map” (Q&A with Bisa Butler). This layering is typical of collage, including textile collage, but Butler specifically wants to create quilts, so she stitches them together with thread. She values quilting as her art form because she wants to take part in the long Black American tradition of quilting which began with enslaved Black women who combined fabric scraps to create a distinct new craft (Logan). 

More than simply participating in this tradition, however, Butler has added to and transformed it into a means of portraiture to depict the Black experience through her groundbreaking style. According to craft scholar Glenn Adamson, “Butler is elevating the status of her subjects by making portraits, and also elevating quilting– which is an African American craft tradition– by adding portraiture to it” (Logan). The artist herself frequently cites her primary goal as telling untold stories through her work, and I certainly left her exhibit feeling that I’d encountered people and experiences– as well as a unique style– I never would have otherwise. 

To see some of her work, check out https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9324/bisa-butler-portraits.