ABOUT BISA BUTLER
American fiber artist who has created a new genre of quilting that has transformed the medium. She is known for her vibrant, quilted portraits celebrating black life, portraying both everyday people and notable historical figures.
In 1991, she graduated from Columbia High School. She majored in fine art and graduated cum laude from Howard University , where she studied the work of Romare Bearden. She went on to complete a master's degree in art education from Montclair State University in 2004, where she took a fiber art class that inspired her choice of quilting as an artistic medium.
Her works now stand among the permanent collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Art Institute of Chicago, and about a dozen other art museums nationwide. In 2020, she was commissioned to quilt cover images for Time magazine including the "Person of the Year" issue and its "100 Women of the Year" issue.
Her mother is a French teacher from New Orleans, while her father, a college president, was born in Ghana. She is the youngest child in her family of three siblings.
In college, she attended lectures by prominent black artists such as Lois Mailou Jones . She also studied under lecturer Elizabeth Catlett .
