Bisa Butler is an award winning African American textile artist. She is known for her vibrantly stunning larger than life sized quilted portraits. Butler carefully selects colours and fabrics that hold symbolic meaning for each of her portraits, revealing details about her subjects— and herself.

The process of quilting itself is also significant. There is a long history of quilting among Black women in America. By using this art form, Butler acknowledges that tradition.

Butler started out making portraits of important people in her life, including her daughters, friends, and family. “My original goal for creating portraits was out of love,” Butler explains. Soon she realised she could make a bigger statement with her work.

Like a painter, Butler selects her palette using fabrics from Ghana, her father's homeland, as well as other African countries. Her mother, from New Orleans, was raised in Morocco.

Butler says, “I'm thinking about colour as a way to express inner emotions or personality traits and I'm selecting African fabric to talk about the fact that we are of African descent and we have a long history that was taken. It is known that we have lineage and we come from people. So I want that to be acknowledged and I'll choose different fabrics depending on what the story is.”

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The Art department would like to celebrate the rich diversity we have in our community by setting an art brief for all students in response to Butler’s artwork.

Students who submit artwork have the opportunity for it to appear in the Newsletter and be awarded artist of the month.

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Brief:

We would like you to create a piece of artwork in response to Bisa Butler which celebrates your own culture. This could be a self portrait or a portrait of a family member or friend and include patterns and colour connected to yours/their culture. This can be done in a media of your choice and should be minimum A5 in size.

Deadline: Monday 6 November

Any questions, please ask Mrs Sheehan.