Bisa Butler

Have you ever seen a picture of Frederick Douglass? I have, too. In most photographs, he is wearing a suit, carrying the weight of injustice in his furrowed brows, with an intensity in the eyes that permeates the photo’s grey glaze. He sits like a king upon his throne, looking every bit the legend he will become. Fiber artist Bisa Butler captures Douglass in a new light—literally. In her version, titled The Storm, The Whirlwind, and The Earthquake, Douglass is imposing, towering at seven feet tall. She used various grades of silk in hues of marigold, mauve, and magenta to create Douglass’s puckered lips, almond eyes, textured hair, and chiseled cheekbones. In Butler’s version, Douglass feels human, and not only does he appear to be debonair, he is so fly. If this version of Douglass appeared in my dating app, I would definitely swipe right. 

 

Butler works solely in textiles, but her most recent work, a debut exhibition at NYC’s Claire Oliver Gallery, where she is represented, would have you believe otherwise. In her dynamic montage of patterns and textures that interact so seamlessly, it actually appears that the works are painted. The life-size subjects, all of whom draw from the African-American and African diasporic experiences, meet viewers at eye level and draw them in. When I visit Butler at her home-studio in West Orange, New Jersey, she is knee deep in her new work, Warmth of Other Son, for The Newark Museum of Art. This show and her first solo exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art were derailed by the pandemic, and though we are in tumultuous times, Butler hasn't been knocked off course; in fact, she is as focused and steadfast as ever. 

Bisa Butler was born and bred in South Orange, New Jersey, to an African-American mother born in New Orleans but raised in Morocco, where Butler's grandfather worked in the Foreign Service. And her father, a hard-working Ghanaian immigrant, was the president of Essex County College in Newark for 39 years. Butler first discovered her penchant for art at what she smilingly describes as the “deep hippy” Children of the Rainbow school, located inside a big Victorian house that allowed students to wander from room to room exploring various disciplines. The diminutive Butler could never pull herself away from the art room. Much like now, she constantly worked on her pieces, and recalls, “I spent every day in the art room. That’s when I first started getting into doing hundreds of hours of artwork. And I remember people coming in the art room saying, ‘Bisa, that looks really good.’” That response stuck with her. Later, she graduated from South Orange's Columbia High School, a cradle of creativity producing alumni like Lauryn Hill and SZA. Years later, Butler worked at her alma mater while honing her own artistic practice.

 

On a sweltering day in early July, I arrived at Butler’s suburban home, greeted by her husband, John, and their younger daughter, who share a gracious personable warmth. Butler soon appears like an apparition from the style Gods, wearing a tailored jumpsuit made from the same West African fabrics used in her work. Like the artist herself, the jumpsuit's polychrome fabrics are vibrant and dynamic. I had briefly encountered Butler for the first time at the EXPO Chicago art fair in 2019, and, in fact, it was her monochrome chartreuse green ensemble that caught my eye before her work etched itself into my lexicon. Like body language or facial expressions, style is a form of communication, a language laced throughout Butler's work. It's no wonder her subjects always appear to be in their Sunday best, even when it's not Sunday. 

 

For a little context, let’s step back into the Netherlands of the 1850s when Jean Baptiste Theodore Preveinaire and Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen tried to mass produce batik wax fabrics. The Dutch had become familiar with a Javanese method of dyeing cloth by using wax-resist techniques when they colonized Indonesia. Although batik textiles originated in China and India in the eighth century, it was the Indonesians who mastered the art in the thirteenth century. Preveinaire and Vlissingen’s mass-manufactured fabrics paled in comparison to genuine batik prints, which failed to sell, not only because Javanese locals observed flaws in the prints, but also because they lacked the elemental smell of the real wax fabrics. Nevertheless, by the 1880s, the Dutch-produced prints found a thriving market in their colonies throughout West Africa. Today, the Vlisco Group is the largest producer of these textiles, manufacturing 2.1 billion yards with an annual revenue upwards of 300 million dollars. 

 

Although wax prints began in Asia, they have become part of the iconography of West Africa. Butler’s home studio is lined with the textiles, their lush colors and patterns captivating the eye. But literally, she points out, the fabrics themselves are laden with messages, and because of this, Butler will use specific fabrics to develop a subject’s narrative. On the Frederick Douglass piece, his vest fabric is called “speedy bird,” representing free people. Douglass’s trousers are a product of a collaboration between Vlisco and the City of Joy, a Congolese safe haven for survivors of war sex crimes, so like their designers, each pant leg chronicles the  journey to freedom. The sleeves of his tailed tuxedo jacket have fabric sporting alphabet letters, indicating someone who is literate. 

 

Butler’s work, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, is also fulsome with meaning, a piece featuring four African-American women sitting on the steps of Atlanta College in 1900. The fabric on their hats indicates change, property, freedom and transition. The skirt pattern printed with shiny earrings symbolizes the culture of wealth in West Africa: the bigger the earrings, the wealthier. The red shoe print conveys power, and is called Michelle Obama’s Shoes, inspired by the Obamas’ 2009 visit to Ghana. In this work, Butler manages to create a time-transcending connection between pioneering foremothers and a daughter who is educated, resource-rich, and became the first Black First Lady of the United States. It’s as if Butler extends deep gratitude to the maternal ancestors for lighting the way forward.  

 

Research is the heartbeat of any substantive work, creative, scholarly or otherwise. In 1935, the Federal Writers Project was born from President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, and well-known writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were hired to document the lives of African-Americans. Prior to the FWP, there were scant records of black life in the United States. The writers of FWP interviewed thousands of African-Americans, 2,000 of whom were first-person accounts of people who were once enslaved, and many more accounts described life during Jim Crow and insights on their new lives in the North. FWP writers created an official historical record of the Black experience in America and unofficially, unbeknownst to even themselves, were documenting what later became The Great Migration. 

 

For her work Zouave, she cascades through a collection of images on her iPad, pulling up an archived photo of an unknown young African soldier dressed in traditional military attire. She explains, “Look at this guy, he’s in Paris getting ready to go to war. I’m looking at his face, he’s looking at me. I’m looking at his gaze, the way he’s holding his gun. I’m looking at his clothes, that’s what grabbed me. Look how proud he is. I actually looked it up, he wasn’t from Algeria. The French called all Africans, Algerians. But when I looked up his outfit, he’s actually Senegalese. That unit was called The Senegalese Tirailleurs. They wore these Algerian style clothes because that was the unit they were part of working with the North African French defense. They put them on the frontline whether they came back or not; if they do come back, they are colonized anyway. He’s fighting for France. So then it became a whole thing for me. Did he even survive the war? Did he come home? What was the respect factor? Did he even get honored for sacrificing years of his life and maybe his whole life? Did his family receive a pension?”

 

Through research she amasses information, learns personal histories, and discovers untold narratives, which become the foundation of her work. With this information, she works to honor lives, tell their stories and bestow what has  always been stripped from them, humanity. Her former assistant, Adebunmi Gbadebo, an emerging artist also represented by the Claire Oliver gallery, says, “I do believe, in the images that Bisa chooses, there’s like this spirit that’s still alive and is holding her responsible to represent them in a responsible way. And she recognizes that, and she honors that, and I think all the detail, all the time, every stitch, is her way of honoring the energy that’s been captured in those photographs. Her whole process is about honoring these people that have been forgotten and just discarded.”  

 

Butler tells me, "At Howard, anybody who comes out of the program and makes art, anybody who looks at your art should feel good about themselves, should see affirmations about Black culture, and they should be learning something. They drilled that into us." Informed by this artistic ideology, she combats that side effect of oppression, an insidious and pervasive self-loathing, infusing pride and dignity in her subjects, who are never portrayed as down-trodden, but  always embellished in fine threads and rooted in regality. Butler says, "I hate the gaze of pity. My father grew up very poor but he's not somebody you need to look at and feel sorry for. Just because you have money doesn't mean that you need to feel sorry for me and that I need to look up to you. Absolutely not. I think we as a people know that, but other people don't realize that." 

 

The voice that Butler struggled to define as a younger artist is now in full effect, Weisbord continues, “The more she started getting into historic photographs, the depths of the concepts became stronger. She started tapping into her deeper cultural messaging using these fabrics with humorous reference to add depth to the piece.” Over the phone, I can hear the delight in Weisbord’s voice as she explains her work dynamic with Butler, “So, we would bounce ideas about language back and forth. It was fun for me to see not just the artistic evolution but really focus on her personal voice. And truthfully, the timing for this work is just unbelievable,” she says with a slight chuckle.  

 

Bisa Butler’s work has elevated the quilt and innovated the portrait, creating a formidable seat for them at the table of contemporary art. She has brought the black historical narrative and imagery of the past back into focus. At a time where black people’s humanity can be stolen in 8 minutes and 46 seconds and broadcast for all the world to see, Butler’s work is a much needed reminder that the lives of Black people always have and always will matter.