Newport Art Museum will present Pride and Presence: a virtual Artist Talk with quilt artist and storyteller Bisa Butler on Thursday, May 6, at 6:30 p.m. The talk is $15 general admission, free for students to age 18, and will be delivered virtually via Zoom. Registration is required to receive the Zoom link, and is available at newportartmuseum.org/events.
A quilt is a potent object. Made by hand, even the most minimal quilt design is a material record of the life, inspirations, tastes, history and beliefs of the maker and recipient.
Bisa Butler’s glorious contemporary quilts utilize the medium to lift up the stories of African American individuals both known and unknown. The vibrant colors and patterns of African fabrics from her ancestral Ghana, batiks from Nigeria, and prints from South Africa create a visual cacophony, a blissed-out intensity, brilliant beauty and feeling of celebration. Her textile portraits immortalize cultural figures and anonymous individuals alike. Dignified and regal, their unapologetic maximalism finally makes looking away, ignoring, or forgetting them, an impossibility.
The Newport Art Museum is pleased to partner with the Sankofa Community Connection of Newport, whose mission includes working towards school curriculums that recognize and celebrate the cultural heritage of African Americans of colonial Newport, to welcome acclaimed artist Bisa Butler for a virtual artist talk followed by Q&A.
About Bisa Butler
Bisa Butler (b. 1974) is an African American quilt artist who has been making quilts since the mid- 1990s. A fine arts graduate of Howard University, Butler left an art teaching position to focus on her artwork. At 47 years old, Butler’s work has touched audiences worldwide. Her quilt portraits were exhibited in late 2020 at the Katonah Museum in New York, and currently 20 of her quilts are on view in a solo show, Bisa Butler: Portraits, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been recognized by the Smithsonian Magazine, artnet news, Forbes, Essence magazine, The Wall Street Journal, TIME magazine, The New York Times, Artforum International, among many others. She lives and works in New York.
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