And now the first portrait she made in the medium, of her grandparents, is hanging on an Art Institute well. ![]() She trained at Howard University as a painter but did not find her artistic spark, Butler said, until switching to fabric. I’m trying to refute that and set the story straight.” “I like to imagine a life for the images I see.” At the same time, she said, “a lot of times in my work I’m trying to dispute falsehoods and stereotypes. “I operate in a way like a cultural anthropologist,” Butler said during an Art Institute video tour of the exhibition in November. ![]() I knew it wasn’t, and I’m still totally amazed when I get in close and see all these layers, all these small pieces of fabric… and the kind of interdisciplinary approach to materiality, where she is trained as a painter, but she’s using photographs and using these printed textiles and she’s quilting.”īut beyond the technical skill, Warren said, Butler draws you in to her characters, “telling these really personal stories about these people,” whether known figures like Frederick Douglass or relatives. The trompe l’oeil effect created by the scores of hours Butler puts into a work is powerful, Warren points out: “I think a lot of people, when they see the work, they think it’s a painting. Warren first saw Butler’s work at the 2018 Expo, she said, and immediately “thought that it was amazing.” Those pieces sold out quickly, but she worked so that the museum could acquire a Butler work, “The Safety Patrol,” which now hangs as the piece that greets visitors as they enter the exhibition. Butler's exhibition, "Bisa Butler: Portraits," is open to the public from Nov. Erica Warren pose for a photograph in front of Butler's work, "Southside Sunday Morning," at the Art Institute Friday, Nov. You could call it a highlight of the show - especially hung along with the source photo as reference - but this exhibition is virtually all highlights, breathtaking works whose scale asks you to get lost in them whose execution, painting in fabric with audacious highlights and subtle details, makes you think you are seeing something entirely new whose subject matter asks profound questions about the 20th century African American experience.Īrtist Bisa Butler, right, and curator Dr. “And then to the City of Chicago itself, I wanted it to be like a love letter, like, ‘I’m coming from the outside, but I recognize this long tradition of celebrating the arts.’” I wanted the Black people of Chicago to understand that I’m using this iconic image of these Black boys to say that, ‘I am you. “I wanted to make a special piece to sort of make myself visible in an expo where there’s so many people,” Butler explained during a November interview, when she was in Chicago helping install the exhibition. But the essence of the photo is the same, the boys’ penetrating gaze, unflinching, directly at the viewer. She makes their already dapper clothing colorful and expressive, a riot of fabrics, and their faces glow with color. Sometimes she uses family pictures or obscure ones or combinations of several, but in this case the image comes from a well-known black-and-white Russell Lee picture, “Negro Boys on Easter Morning,” shot in Bronzeville in 1941.īutler removes the car they are sitting on and turns the background from a cityscape to tufted zig zag stripes. Its source is a photograph, like most of Butler’s works, but recontextualized and, of course, rendered into grand-scale fabric concoctions. She made a new quilt specifically for that show that she titled “Southside Sunday Morning.” ![]() Nonetheless she became a sensation on the art fair circuit, including at 2018′s Expo Chicago, where she showed with New York’s Claire Oliver Gallery.
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