?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
BISA BUTLER (1973 - ) Nandi and Natalie (Friends).
Quilted and appliquéd dyed cotton fabrics, 2007. 686x800 mm; 27x31 1/2 inches. Initialed "BB" in thread, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, New Jersey (2007).
This early work by Bisa Butler is the first quilt of this exciting contemporary fabric artist to come to auction.
Formally trained, Bisa Butler graduated Cum Laude from Howard University with a BFA degree. It was during her education at Howard that Butler was able to refine her natural talents under the tutelage of lecturers such as Lois Mailou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, Jeff Donaldson and Ernie Barnes. Butler then went on to earn a Masters in Art from Montclair State University in 2005. Bisa Butler was a high school art teacher for 10 years in the Newark Public Schools and 3 years at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. While in the process of obtaining her Masters degree Butler took a Fiber Arts class where she had an artistic epiphany and she finally realized how to express her art. "As a child, I was always watching my mother and grandmother sew, and they taught me. After that class, I made a portrait quilt for my grandmother on her deathbed, and I have been making art quilts ever since."
Butler's work is currently the focus of a solo exhibition Bisa Butler: Portraits at the Art Institute of Chicago, the second stop of a traveling exhibit which began at the Katonah Museum of Art. The Toledo Museum of Art is also currently exhibiting Butler's work in a group show. Butler's artwork has recently been acquired by many private and public collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Nelson-Adkins Museum, The Kemper Museum of Art, The Orlando Museum of Art, The Newark Museum, The Toledo Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
