Bisa Butler’s Enigmatic Quilted Portraits Draw on Iconic Images of Black History
Portrait of Bisa Butler, 2022. Courtesy of Pushpin Films and the artist.
Bisa Butler, who makes kaleidoscopic textile portraits of Black Americans, can be likened to a DJ, who samples culture while providing an original, personal spin on the citation. This correlation is not accidental. “I suppose I am a product of my generation,” Butler told Artsy. “I was born in 1973, which is the birthdate of hip-hop. Our generation had a lot of technology to be able to digitally sample our elders through soundbites.” Through image sampling, Butler appropriates the work of others to represent Black history to a younger audience, while adding her visual flair to the process.
Butler’s hyper-saturated portraits have steadily captivated audiences since her tremendous solo museum exhibition “Bisa Butler: Portraits” (2020–21) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Now, Butler has an equally formidable solo show at Jeffrey Deitch’s New York location, “The World Is Yours,” on view through June 30th. Deitch also included Butler’s work in his dynamic group booth for Art Basel in Miami Beach last year. Titled after a Nas lyric, “The World Is Yours” sees Butler sample iconic portraits by 20th-century Black American photographers. Made in her trademark vivid color palette and metallic quilted fabric, the exhibition further solidifies Butler’s singular visual language and her role as an custodian of Black culture.
Installation view of “Bisa Butler: The World is Yours” at Jeffrey Deitch, New York, 2023. Photo by Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
“[My style] is a way of speaking to people of this generation who can read these symbols,” Butler said of her vibrant use of textiles. In The Passion of Questlove (2023), based on a portrait of Questlove by photographer Daniel Dosa, Butler adds her personal style to Questlove by changing his outfit, adding his signature glasses and a bandana handkerchief around his neck. In Butler’s portrait, Questlove’s brown skin is quilted in bright shades of metallic magenta and orange, and his garment is dotted with various African patterns set against the backdrop of a pastel yellow and green rose fabric. These personal additions make Butler’s portrait something of a remix, where the original is still present but has been transformed.
After all, it was personal style that led Butler to arrive at her now-trademark approach. While a student at Howard University (a historically Black college) in the 1990s, Butler’s professor Al Smith delivered sage advice to the artist: to incorporate her fashion style into her work. “I remember [he said], ‘Look at how you dress and how you change your clothes. But none of these textures or styles are reflected in your artwork.’” Butler had been wearing a dashiki with lace sleeves, black lace pants, and black Dr. Martens with paint splattered on them, she said. Since then, Butler’s work has incorporated extreme patterns, mixed textiles, and bright colors of her personal aesthetic into artistic practice, making it frankly, undeniably cool.
Bisa Butler, The Passion of Questlove, 2023. Photo by Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
Bisa Butler, Colored Entrance (after Department Store, Mobile, Alabama by Gordon Parks, 1956), 2023. Photo by Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
After Butler became a mother, textile-based art allowed her to continue her practice on a more practical level. “I was a mother with two little girls and I couldn’t have paint nearby, nor could I close the doors,” Butler said. “Quilts are meant to be in a family setting, they are meant to keep us warm. [Making quilts] allows me to clothe and take care of my family.” She also said that this medium deepened her relationship to her mother and grandmother, who were both seamstresses.
A personal relationship to the work is not just reflected in Butler’s use of textiles, but also in the image selection for her samples in “The World Is Yours.” For example, the show includes Hot, Cool, and Vicious (2022), her standout portrait of Salt-N-Pepa; and Colored Entrance (after Department Store, Mobile, Alabama by Gordon Parks) (2023), a vivid take on Gordon Parks’s iconic 1956 photograph of a woman waiting with her daughter by the “colored” entrance in segregated Alabama. For the first time in her career, Butler is drawing from a contemporary archive (as well as historical) by living photographers. For her, this has raised the stakes, since the creator of the original is able to see her version. “I’m by nature a shy person. It’s a big thing to ask someone if I can touch [their] vision and put my spin on it,” she said.
Bisa Butler, detail of Colored Entrance (after Department Store, Mobile, Alabama by Gordon Parks, 1956), 2023. Photo by Genevieve Hanson. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York.
In this way, “The World Is Yours” allows Butler to do what hip-hop culture did for her in the 1990s: Educate her audience about Black culture while that history is being erased from public schools. “I remember Public Enemy in high school. They were speaking to us directly and naming the people we should be listening to [that] were not in our schoolbooks,” Butler said. “We, the children of the 1960s and 1970s, had to recapture that stuff in the 1990s.”
For Butler, her personal education through hip-hop makes the works richer, and more contemporary. “I lived through it,” she said. “For the first time, I am making images of our identity and iconography as opposed to our ancestors’ images of what represents beauty.”
