Bisa Butler: Quilts, Archives, and the Work of Bringing People Back

Last night we went to hear Bisa Butler in conversation with curator/art historian Danny Dunson from the DuSable Black History Museum. I was very excited to be in the same room with her, and getting to meet her was simply thrilling.

I was hooked and captivated by Butler’s work when I first saw her exhibition “Portraits” at the Art Institute Chicago in 2021. The works were huge. Sometimes ten feet tall. Intricate portraits created from fabric, stitching together history and the present.

Butler works from historical photographs; many pulled from archives like the Library of Congress. Some of the images are well-known, even famous, but many are anonymous.

She described the experience of enlarging these photographs to the size of the finished quilt and living with them for months while she works. “Some of those photos are just sitting there like glass negatives in a stack somewhere with dust on them. They deserve better than that.”

Butler is pulling people out of the archive and putting them back into the world.

One of the interesting things about Butler’s process is that she always begins by sketching on top of a black-and-white photograph. Which means she invents all of the color.

Fabric choices become a kind of interpretive act, something close to emotional speculation. What kind of energy did this person have? What story might they carry?

She described one portrait of a young pregnant woman whose life she didn’t know much about. As she worked on the piece, Butler added sparrows as highlights, to reference the gospel hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”

Her explanation was simple: “I wanted to deliberately put a blessing on her.”

Butler and her husband John, who is a DJ, share a studio. While she works on her portraits, he is nearby, working on his music. John tracks down original recordings sampled by hip-hop artists. Butler is interested in that source material, because—while she loves hip hop—she wants to fully appreciate the depth, the rhythm, and the feeling underneath both tracks.

That idea of the original underneath the remix feels like a strangely perfect metaphor for her work. The photograph is the sample. Her quilt is the deeper track. Thousands of pieces of fabric stitched together.

Her artistic process is the kind of slow, repetitive labor historically associated with domestic life, but in Butler’s skilled hands and imagination, the work becomes a monumental “painting.”

Butler is a towering talent. Her huge, radiant fabric portraits are the stuff of art history. They go beyond scale and technical skill.

What Bisa Butler creates is a feeling. The feeling that the people depicted in her quilts are present again, pulled forward from the past and given the grace and dignity that they deserve.