Bisa Butler - Editions & Works on Paper New York Wednesday, February 12, 2025 | Phillips
  • “The making of quilts is a healing process.”
    —Bisa Butler
    Bursting with vivid saturated color and intricately patterned textiles, Bisa Butler’s life-sized quilted portraits depict historical Black subjects with a vibrancy that radiates from her textile-based compositions. When approaching her chosen medium of quilting, Butler embraces the historically minimized medium to inform and grapple with the historic marginalization of the Black Americans at the center of her practice. The artist’s quilts are entirely formed of fabric and stitched to add detail and texture to her compositions with a long-arm quilting machine, which allows for dexterity when working at such an intricate level. Depending on the complexity of her compositions, a quilt can take Butler between 100 and 2,000 hours to complete. With Daughter of the Dust, Butler translates her 2020 quilt, exhibited at her debut Clair Oliver Gallery show The Storm, the Whirlwind and the Earthquake, into an archival pigment print rendered with such clarity, that the quilted lines and texture come through on the paper.

     

    Butler’s quilts are deeply inspired by personal and art historical reference points: Romare Bearden’s collages, Faith Ringgold’s quilts, and Gordan Parks’ photography are all cited as influences for the artist, alongside the long-held tradition of sewing in her family, as her mother and grandmother both engaged in the craft daily. The African American quilting tradition in America extends back to slavery, where enslaved people stitched together pieces from worn out clothes to create blankets to stay warm, and recently a resurgence in appreciation for the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama has drawn attention to the improvisational techniques that result in dazzling abstract compositions, a craft handed down over generations. For Bisa’s source images, she finds historic imagery of Black people in America in public archives, with the inspiration for the print Daughter of the Dust coming from the World War-II era photographs found in the Farm Security Administration database through the Library of Congress.  

     

    Daughter of Mrs. D. Saggus, FSA (Farm Security Administration) borrower. Greene County, Georgia. Image courtesy of Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).

    Drawing on the West African roots of her father, Butler often uses Dutch Wax fabric, commonly found in his home country of Ghana, when intricately piecing her figures. Dutch Wax itself, a mainstay of contemporary African fashion, has deep colonial roots from the 19th century Dutch factories that began making faux batiks and ultimately honed their designs to Ghanian tastes when the fabrics exploded in popularity in the African country. In Daughter of the Dust, Bisa incorporates these iconic fabrics in the young girl’s bodice and layered skirt. When speaking about her choice in fabrics, self said “I use West African wax printed fabric, kente cloth, and Dutch wax prints to communicate that all of my figures are of African descent and have a long and rich history behind them. I choose bright technicolor cloth to represent our skin because these colors are how African Americans refer to our complexions.”i While traditionally trained as a painter, Butler turned to fiber arts while she was pregnant, and even after her daughter was born she continued her textile-based craft, due to the toxic nature of many oil paints and thinners. Building on this painterly foundation, Butler intricately layers a variety of textile substrates from wool to velvet to silk like a painter might later glaze, slowly building a rich composition that represents the depth of history in both image, material, and technique. 

     

     

    i Claire Oliver Gallery, “Clair Oliver Gallery Announces Fist Solo Exhibition by Artist Bisa Butler” (press release), 2020, online.

    • Provenance

      Claire Oliver Gallery, New York

36

Daughter of the Dust

2020
Inkjet pigment print in colors, on wove paper, the full sheet.
S. 47 1/2 x 30 in. (120.7 x 76.2 cm)
Signed and numbered 35/50 in pencil, framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$2,000 - 4,000 

Sold for $11,430

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 12 February 2025