Bisa Butler Portraits @ The Katonah Museum of Art: This exhibit is open Tuesday through Sunday through October 4 – we show it on our calendars only on weekends!

The Katonah Museum of Art reopens for members on Tuesday, July 21 (and to the public on July 26) with it’s Bisa Butler: Portraits exhibition that will continue through October 4. (This exhibition originally opened on March 15, just one week before Governor Cuomo’s New York Pause, that shut down all non-essential businesses, was put into effect. The show was originally scheduled to run through June 14 and travel to the Art Institute of Chicago.) It is the first solo museum exhibition of Butler’s works and features 25-30 of her vivid, larger-than-life quilts that capture African American identity and culture.

More about Bisa Butler: Portraits: KMA

In this exhibition, Butler reinvents the quilt art form, associated with working women and domesticity, with an aesthetic influenced by the works of Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold. Her portraits imbue the craft medium of quilt making with painterly subjects sourced from photographs. And her use of scale, vibrant colors and fabrics with a wide range of emotional intensity contribute to a narrative effect that elevates this traditional craft medium into high art.

For each quilt, Butler takes inspiration from photographs. Her choice of fabrics, textures, and vibrant colors contributes to the sense of narrative, social statement and cultural identity that each work suggests. The cultural references of the fabrics she chooses for each quilt demonstrates the layers and dimensions of thought she invests in the narrative values of her art.

Butlers materials include African painted cotton and mud cloth from her ancestral Ghanaian homeland; vintage lace and aged satin reflect her embrace of the delicacy and refinement of times past, and multi-colored organza and layered netting convey her embrace of a colorful and multifaceted worldview. Finally, the element of scale to her works embellishes the sense of social statement jumping out of the medium she is transforming.

Despite the grand scale she brings to her pieces, Butler maintains a sense of intimacy by choosing family memories and cultural practices as her subjects. Many of her works are portraits of family members such as her maternal grandparents. Butler’s works chosen for this exhicbition also pay homage to many cultural icons of African-American life such as Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Barack Obama’s election in her One Vote Can Change the World, Black Lives Matter, the “Graffiti” Artist Basquiat, Richard Wesley’s play The Mighty Giants, and Atlanta’s Morris Brown College. But her work comes alive in a very universal way in her portrayal of young boys in Southside Sunday Morning and in her celebrations of young girls, in The Princess, Four Little Girls and the portrait of her goddaughter Anaya With Oranges. (All shown here.)

Katonah Museum of Art is located at 134 Jay Street (Rt. 22) in Katonah