Bisa Butler facts for kids

Bisa Butler (born Mailissa Yamba Butler in 1973) is an American fiber artist. She creates amazing quilts that look like paintings! Her unique style has changed how people see quilting. It used to be seen as a craft, but Bisa Butler's work has made it a respected form of fine art.

She is famous for her bright, colorful quilted portraits. These artworks celebrate Black life. She shows both everyday people and important historical figures. Her quilts are now in major museums. These include the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Art Institute of Chicago. She has also shown her art at places like the Epcot Center. In 2020, she even made quilt covers for Time magazine! One of her quilts sold for $75,000 in 2021. Many people want her art, and there's a long wait list for her special commissions.

Bisa Butler's Early Life

Bisa Butler, whose full name is Mailissa Yamba Butler, was born in Orange, New Jersey. She grew up in South Orange. She finished high school at Columbia High School in 1991. Her mother was a French teacher, and her father, who was born in Ghana, became a college president. Bisa was the youngest of four children. She loved art from a very young age, even winning an art contest when she was just four years old!

Discovering Her Artistic Path

Butler went to Howard University to study fine art. There, she learned about famous artists like Romare Bearden. She also met important Black artists such as Lois Mailou Jones and Elizabeth Catlett. She first studied painting, but she felt it wasn't quite right for her. Instead, she started making collages with fabric on canvas.

Later, Butler earned a master's degree in art education from Montclair State University in 2004. This is where she found her true passion: quilting! She took a Fiber Art class that changed everything. She shared that she had watched her mother and grandmother sew when she was little. After that class, she made a quilt for her grandmother. She has been quilting ever since.

Her final project was a quilt called "Francis and Violette." It was a quilted version of her grandmother's wedding photo. Both Bisa and her professor realized she had created a brand new way of quilting.

Besides being an artist, Bisa Butler taught art in the Newark Public Schools for over ten years. Today, she lives and works in West Orange, New Jersey.

Bisa Butler's Unique Art Style

Patternmaster (2023) is a portrait of Octavia E. Butler. It is shown at the National Portrait Gallery.

Bisa Butler's main goal with her quilts is to "tell stories that may have been forgotten." She often uses special fabrics like kente cloth and African wax prints. These fabrics are from Africa. She says her subjects are "made up of the cloth of our ancestors."

How She Uses Fabric and Color

Butler's quilts use African textiles. They also build on a long tradition of African American quilting. She explains that African Americans have been quilting since they first came to this country. They used small scraps of fabric to make warm blankets. This is how the African American quilt style began. Bisa's art is like this tradition, but she uses fabrics from Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa. She also gets ideas from the fabric art of Faith Ringgold.

Bisa Butler often uses bright, jewel-toned colors for skin tones. These colors are not meant to be realistic. Instead, they show the emotions of the people in her quilts. Using these bright colors, like those from the Black Power art movement, helps capture the "soul and energy" of the person. When she was at Howard University, she was guided by artists from a group called AfriCOBRA. Their bright, colorful style and goal to show Black Americans in a positive way can be seen in Butler's art too.

Who She Quilts

Her quilts often show famous people from Black history. Some examples include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jackie Robinson, Frederick Douglass, and Josephine Baker. Butler carefully chooses different patterned fabrics for each person. She sometimes even uses fabrics that the person wore. For example, her quilt of Nina Simone uses cotton, silk, velvet, and netting. Her quilt of Jean-Michel Basquiat uses leather, cotton, and old denim.

Besides famous figures, Butler also creates art about everyday, unknown African Americans. She finds old photographs and uses them as inspiration. She loves imagining the stories of these nameless people. She wants to bring their photos to the front. She believes these ordinary people deserve to be seen and celebrated too.

Her artworks are often life-sized. This helps viewers feel like they can connect with the people in the quilts. The figures often look directly at you, inviting you to think about their stories.

One of her largest quilts is Harlem Hellfighters. It is about 11 by 13 feet and shows nine life-sized figures. This quilt was bought by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It is based on a 1919 photo of the 369th Infantry Regiment, known as the Harlem Hellfighters, from World War I. Butler says her work helps these heroes be seen and remembered for their fight against unfairness and for freedom.

Bisa Butler's Popularity

By 2019, Bisa Butler already had a waiting list for her art that was several years long! This was even before her first big museum show. Her art became even more famous after that. In 2021, three of her quilts sold at auction for a lot of money. One quilt, Nandi and Natalie (Friends) (2007), sold for $75,000. This was much more than expected!

She has also created covers for many magazines. These include Juxtapoz, Time magazine (for their "Person of the Year" issue), and Essence magazine. Her art has also been featured by the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).

Exhibitions and Collections

Bisa Butler's art has been shown in many places. In 2019, her work was shown alongside Romare Bearden's art in a Black History Month exhibition. Her quilts are also in art books and on popular websites.

Her first solo museum exhibition was called Bisa Butler: Portraits. It was shown at the Katonah Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Even though it was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, it was very successful.

Her quilt Harlem Hellfighters was part of a special exhibition at the Renwick Gallery from 2022 to 2023. Her art was also in an exhibition called "Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories." In 2023, she had another exhibition called "The World Is Yours."

Where You Can See Her Art

Bisa Butler's quilts are part of the permanent collections in many museums. This means you can often see her art there! Some of these museums include:

• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
• Art Institute of Chicago, IL
• Newark Museum of Art, NJ
• Orlando Museum of Art, FL
• Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN
• Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO
• Mount Holyoke Art Museum, Hadley, MA
• Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO
• Toledo Museum of Art, OH
• Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL

See also

• Stephen Towns
• Faith Ringgold
• Sheila Hicks
• Carolyn L. Mazloomi
• Diedrick Brackens
• Michael James