Bisa Butler

Bisa Butler makes quilts. The medium sits in the long American tradition of African American quilting — Gee’s Bend, the Underground Railroad signal squares — and she has pulled it forward into a form that’s closer to portraiture than to bedding.

Her figures are Black children, families, soldiers, dreamers, sometimes sourced from twentieth-century studio photography, then rebuilt from West African wax prints, Dutch wax, kente, indigos, neon stripes. The fabrics sing against each other. The faces — eyes, mouths — are stitched in the same vocabulary, the same fabric grammar, until the figure coheres as a person without ever being painted.

She lives and works in New Jersey, has had solo shows at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian, and is represented by Claire Oliver Gallery.