Bisa Butler

Bisa Butler is an award winning African American textile artist. She is known for her vibrantly stunning larger than life sized quilted portraits that captivate viewers around the world. While in the process of obtaining her Master’s degree, Butler took a Fiber Arts class where she had an artistic epiphany and she finally realized how to express her art. “As a child, I was always watching my mother and grandmother sew, and they taught me. After that class, I made a portrait quilt for my grandmother on her deathbed, and I have been making art quilts ever since.”

In 2022, Butler was awarded a Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship and will be exhibiting in Switzerland during Art Basel this coming June with the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. She was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Bloomfield College this past May. Butler’s work was the focus of a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, the second stop of a traveling exhibit which began at the Katonah Museum of Art. Many institutions and museums have acquired Butler’s work including: The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Perez Museum of Miami, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Nelson-Adkins Museum, 21cMuseum Hotels, The Kemper Museum of Art, The Orlando Museum of Art, The Newark Museum, The Toledo Museum of Art, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Hunter Museum of American Art and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.