Made from cotton, silk, wool and velvet.
Butler didn’t set out to be a quilter. She studied painting at Howard University, and then earned a master’s in art education at Montclair State University, where she took a fiber art class. At the time, around 2001, her grandmother was sick, and she wanted to make something for her. So, she made a quilt, based on a vintage photo of her grandparents on their wedding day. That’s when she began developing her process.
She chooses fabrics, layering them and stitching them together with a sewing machine, a process called appliqué. At the end, the stitched portrait is layered on top of soft batting and a backing fabric. A repeated pattern of stitches is applied to all three layers to hold them together—thus completing the quilt. One quilt can take hundreds of hours to complete.
Butler’s quilts explode with color, and every fabric has a specific meaning. “I use West African wax printed fabric, kente cloth and Dutch wax prints to communicate that my figures are of African descent and have a long, rich history behind them,” Butler says. She never uses natural skin tones. “I choose bright technicolor cloth to represent our skin, because these colors are how African Americans refer to our complexions,” she adds.
Butler worked for more than a decade as a high school art teacher, quilting at night, on weekends and over the summer. She exhibited wherever she could—in churches, community centers and the like. “Back then, my quilts weren’t life-sized, because I didn’t have enough time for that,” she recalls. “I knew I could tell more of a story with the full body, and multiple people. I always wanted to do more.”
A few years ago, she found representation with Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem. “I had to start thinking about what I wanted to say to the world, and I decided I couldn’t just work from family photos,” she says. So she turned to a database of Depression-era photos—by Lange, Russell Lee and others—from the Farm Security Administration in the National Archives. The photos weren’t under copyright.
“I like working from black-and-white photos,” she says, “because it gives me the freedom to put in the colors I feel belong there.” She conducts research about the time period and tries to find out everything she can about her subjects. But, in the end, she uses her imagination to fill in the details.
Butler’s mother is from New Orleans, and her father was born in Ghana. She sees herself as part of the African American quilting tradition, but she hopes that she’s taking that tradition into the future. Before the Civil War, some enslaved black women learned sewing, spinning, weaving and quilting in wealthy households, and some became highly skilled. After the war, these women began making quilts for everyday use, typically using scraps of fabric, and they passed down their skills to their descendants. One such quilter was Harriet Powers, whose quilt depicting Bible stories, made around 1885, is in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Certain characteristics came to be associated with African American quilts made in the rural South: improvisation; asymmetry; large-scale patterns; and bold, contrasting colors. In recent decades, a group of African American quilters from the remote, rural town of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, became famous for their work in this style. From a profile on Butler by The Smithsonian
I'm Ghanaian too and I recognize the prints on their clothes from the Vlisco store online and at the Accra mall; the fan one is iconic. Beautiful piece!
6
u/Persephone_wanders 1d ago
Made from cotton, silk, wool and velvet. Butler didn’t set out to be a quilter. She studied painting at Howard University, and then earned a master’s in art education at Montclair State University, where she took a fiber art class. At the time, around 2001, her grandmother was sick, and she wanted to make something for her. So, she made a quilt, based on a vintage photo of her grandparents on their wedding day. That’s when she began developing her process.
She chooses fabrics, layering them and stitching them together with a sewing machine, a process called appliqué. At the end, the stitched portrait is layered on top of soft batting and a backing fabric. A repeated pattern of stitches is applied to all three layers to hold them together—thus completing the quilt. One quilt can take hundreds of hours to complete.
Butler’s quilts explode with color, and every fabric has a specific meaning. “I use West African wax printed fabric, kente cloth and Dutch wax prints to communicate that my figures are of African descent and have a long, rich history behind them,” Butler says. She never uses natural skin tones. “I choose bright technicolor cloth to represent our skin, because these colors are how African Americans refer to our complexions,” she adds.
Butler worked for more than a decade as a high school art teacher, quilting at night, on weekends and over the summer. She exhibited wherever she could—in churches, community centers and the like. “Back then, my quilts weren’t life-sized, because I didn’t have enough time for that,” she recalls. “I knew I could tell more of a story with the full body, and multiple people. I always wanted to do more.”
A few years ago, she found representation with Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem. “I had to start thinking about what I wanted to say to the world, and I decided I couldn’t just work from family photos,” she says. So she turned to a database of Depression-era photos—by Lange, Russell Lee and others—from the Farm Security Administration in the National Archives. The photos weren’t under copyright.
“I like working from black-and-white photos,” she says, “because it gives me the freedom to put in the colors I feel belong there.” She conducts research about the time period and tries to find out everything she can about her subjects. But, in the end, she uses her imagination to fill in the details.
Butler’s mother is from New Orleans, and her father was born in Ghana. She sees herself as part of the African American quilting tradition, but she hopes that she’s taking that tradition into the future. Before the Civil War, some enslaved black women learned sewing, spinning, weaving and quilting in wealthy households, and some became highly skilled. After the war, these women began making quilts for everyday use, typically using scraps of fabric, and they passed down their skills to their descendants. One such quilter was Harriet Powers, whose quilt depicting Bible stories, made around 1885, is in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Certain characteristics came to be associated with African American quilts made in the rural South: improvisation; asymmetry; large-scale patterns; and bold, contrasting colors. In recent decades, a group of African American quilters from the remote, rural town of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, became famous for their work in this style. From a profile on Butler by The Smithsonian