Open Air: Artist Talk with Bisa Butler

Open Air is a monthly series of intimate conversations with Black artists across the globe, hosted by the Gantt. This month's Open Air features renowned and internationally-acclaimed artist, Bisa Butler. Through her dynamic, celebratory quilted portraits of people of African descent, Bisa Butler investigates the purposes and potential of portraiture within the Black historical narrative. Butler's influences range widely from personal family scrapbooks to American folk traditions and AfriCOBRA philosophies.

This program will be livestreamed on our YouTube channel.

Although Bisa Butler's finished works are made entirely of textiles, she approaches the medium from a painterly perspective. Sourcing imagery mainly from photographs, she uses layered fabrics and quilting to create unique compositions, psychological depth, and detailed textures that she found missing from her paintings. By returning to textiles, Butler reconnects with her family's history since it was her grandmother and mother who taught her to sew.

Bisa Butler lives in South Orange, New Jersey, and has a studio in Jersey City. Butler earned her BFA in painting at Howard University, Washington, DC, and holds a MAT in Teaching Art from Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her work has been exhibited widely, both domestically and internationally. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami. The World Is Yours, Butler’s first solo exhibition with Jeffrey Deitch, in 2023 in New York, was enthusiastically received and attracted thousands of visitors.

Dexter Wimberly is an American curator based in Japan who has organized exhibitions in galleries and institutions around the world including the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, The Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, KOKI Arts in Tokyo, Bode Projects in Berlin, and The Third Line in Dubai. His exhibitions have been reviewed and featured in publications including The New York Times and Artforum; and have received support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and The Kinkade Family Foundation. Wimberly is a Senior Critic at New York Academy of Art, and the founder and director of the Hayama Artist Residency in Japan. He is also the co-founder and CEO of the online education platform, CreativeStudy.