Bisa Butler: Portraits

Bisa Butler builds portraits entirely from cloth — cut, layered, and stitched printed cottons standing in for skin, light, and shadow — and this catalogue for her first solo museum exhibition makes the case for reading them as painting's equal rather than as craft.

Published for Bisa Butler: Portraits, co-organised by the Katonah Museum of Art, where it opened in March 2020, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where it ran from November 2020 to September 2021. The 96-page volume carries 37 colour and 3 black-and-white plates with essays by Erica Warren, associate curator of textiles at the Art Institute, on Butler's portraits and art-historical discourse; by Michèle Wije on the relation between photography and quiltmaking, since Butler works from historical photographs, many of them anonymous; and by Jordan Carter setting her alongside Faith Ringgold. Catalogue entries are by Butler, Carter, Isabella Ko, Warren, and Wije.

Butler (born 1973, Orange, New Jersey) came to quilting through a fibre arts class at Howard University and made her first quilt for her dying grandmother, with whom she had spent childhood afternoons over black-and-white family photographs. She taught high school art in New Jersey for a decade before working full time as an artist.