Bisa Butler makes quilted portraits and recently debuted a show with some of her newest work called Hold Me Close. From her artist’s statement:
This body of work is a visual response to how I am feeling as an African American woman living in 2025. We lived through COVID and witnessed the uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement, only to arrive at a time when many of the civil rights I grew up with are being challenged and reversed. Protections and programs for non-white Americans, women, queer people, poor people, and people with disabilities are under attack, and it has left me feeling destabilized. Watching immigrants being hunted, chased down, and kidnapped by masked men horrifies me. The thought of people being gunned down and starved for political agendas is the stuff of nightmares. I’ve been looking for solace and turned to my work like a visual diary.
Colossal has a good gallery of images from the show and Butler did a video tour where you can see how shiny & glittery some of the pieces are:
Hold Me Close is on view from September 13 to November 1, 2025 at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles.
Using colorful African textiles, Bisa Butler makes large quilted portraits of Black Americans. From a statement on her gallery’s website:
In my work, I am telling the story — this African American side — of the American life. History is the story of men and women, but the narrative is controlled by those who hold the pen.
My community has been marginalized for hundreds of years. While we have been right beside our white counterparts experiencing and creating history, our contributions and perspectives have been ignored, unrecorded, and lost. It is only a few years ago that it was acknowledged that the White House was built by slaves. Right there in the seat of power of our country African Americans were creating and contributing while their names were lost to history.
In this short video, you can see how Butler creates her portraits. Look at the amazing sewing machine she uses — it’s got a steering wheel!
You can see more of her work on Instagram and in person at the Katonah Museum of Art in New York through Oct 4, 2020 and at the Art Institute of Chicago starting in November.
Update: I swapped out the previous video embedded above for a longer one that includes sound and an interview w/ Butler. (via @10engines)
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