The artist s life-size images explode with color and are inspired by iconic black and white photos. Her work is on display at Chicago s Art Institute through Sept. 6
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Bisa Butler in the studio. Photography by John Butler.
Bisa Butler’s intricate portrait quilts are often based on found black-and-white photographs of Black people some famous, some anonymous, some familial.
The New Jersey-based artist can spend thousands of hours translating these photographs into meticulously dazzling images. The process, Butler says, is akin to pulling her subjects out of the past and into life today; as she works, she wonders what these people were like. What did they sound like? What made them tick?
While Butler has been making quilts since the mid-’90s, the past year has proven a watershed moment for the 47-year-old artist. Though long delayed by the pandemic, an exhibition of her portraits has just opened at New York’s Katonah Museum and is already a critical hit. Another solo show her most prominent outing to date is on view now at the Art Institute of Chicago, featuring 20 of her luminous, multi-layered fabric portraits.