Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture: Bisa Butler

welcome to the clarice smith distinguished lecture series it's an opportunity to offer new insights in american art as we welcome the perspectives of noted artists critics and scholars i might mention that chloe smith who funds this program is an artist herself as well as an emerita commissioner of the smithsonian american art museum and we're so grateful for her ongoing support i'm delighted to introduce artist visa butler to you she works in quilted portraits and designs which celebrate black lives she was formally trained butler graduated laude from howard university with a bachelor's in fine art degree and also holds a master's in teaching art from montclair state university in today's talk she'll also describe her technique to you i'd also like to point out that her work is on the cover of juxtaposed magazine the fall 2020 edition she's the subject of two solo museum exhibitions this year at the katona museum of art in new york and at the art institute of chicago hi everyone and thank you so much for that lovely introduction thank you all for joining the clary smith lecture series my name is bisa butler and i'm an artist who uses quilting as a medium i usually don't say that i'm a straight out and out quilter because as you see and i'm going to be talking about today i am using vintage photographs i sketch i used to paint and i use these photographs to create images of african american people and when you look at my artwork what you can think about is i'm it's like looking in a family photo album so the images that you'll see are images of how we want to be seen and how we present ourselves to the outside world i'm going to show you the very last piece that i that i just finished i think that was last monday and it is called the warmth of other suns and it is dedicated to the african-american people who came over came from the south up to the north during the great migration and i'm sort of starting back to front today because i thought that that would be interesting to show where i am and then now sort of go backwards into how did i get here so what you're looking at is a ten foot nine and a half foot by twelve foot quilted artwork there are seven family members that you'll see um there is the mother and the father who are over to the left and the grandparents who are over to the right and then right in the center there are two daughters and then a little boy in the front and i'd like to zoom in a little so that you all can see that my artwork is completely quilted um there are there's no paint on here there is no no um there's no drawing on here what i'm using is tiny bits of fabric and i'm sewing all of these bits of fabric together just like somebody would do a patchwork quilt but instead of creating geometric designs or more even abstract design i'm creating actual portraits of people the african-american migration started around 1916 and ended unofficially or i guess officially in 1970 this was the first mass migration of of people who had been marginalized who who had formally been enslaved and they were moving on their own without permission from anybody without they were taking their destinies into their own hands they were escaping the jim crow south they were escaping segregation some people were like directly escaping like threats of lynching or lynchings that had happened the name of the peace the warmth of other sons is actually taken from the book the phenomenal book by isabel wilkerson called the warmth of other sons about the african-american migration that's what sort of inspired me to create this piece along with knowing the stories of my own family um the only difference in the titles um the book its sons s-u-n-s as in people are searching for the warmth of other sons other places prosperity and i changed mine to sons as in the warmth of other sons as in the warmth of other people the the love and the affection the blood and humanity of other people as in black people and i worked on this piece during this whole quarantine so it took me seven months and i was trying to do the math earlier but i've worked on it 10 to 12 hours a day for seven months straight so some mathematicians out there uh please help me out and tell me how many hours that is and i am going to go on to another image that can give you an idea of what my pieces look like in the close-up and and for instance what that piece in particular looks like close up so you can see what i'm talking about um when i say that my artwork is all fabric and i usually put that on my instagram um you can see that i'm using tiny bits of silk cotton lace i'm using velvet and this particular young girl i really not just with her but with most of my figures i want to celebrate african-american features i'm using these bright technicolor hues in order to talk about personality if somebody is a warm and sunny personality or somebody is like really frenetic energy i might use reds and oranges things that that remind us of the blood coursing through our body excitement passion and even the hot sun outside and if i'm using deep blues and purples i might be talking about a totally different personality somebody might be cool and calm they may be kind of laid back they may be even more quiet so when you see colors on my figures you are responding to that color as a motion because we do tend to do that i mean color as personality we're responding to different things and then when you see different types of fabrics since we all use them you know we're all dressed we have fabric i think um from the moment we wake up i mean we were sleeping on sheets we're wearing clothes there's very few times in our day outside of being in the shower or in the bathtub that you are not touching some sort of fabric or some sort of texture so we know what these things feel like and they invoke ideas and memory and i think that's what my what makes that's what makes my artwork very accessible to everybody because not everybody has a painting box and a painting studio in their home but everybody has fabric all over and many many people have quilts and i just want to say one thing about this young lady's hair this is one of the sisters from my piece the warmth of other suns and i use those blue silk flowers in her hair to talk about her personality she is a young girl so i want her to have that sweetness and that delicacy and then i also want to talk about african-american hair texture that it is bunchy you know it does have a kink to it it can have a curl to it it doesn't necessarily lay flat and i'm not discounting anybody's hair texture that does lay flat including black people who have straighter hair or wavier hair but with this particular girl i'm saying like her natural puffy hair texture is beautiful um the next piece that i'd like to talk about i'd like to kind of go back now and show you all where i begin how did this all start um it was mentioned in the intro that i did go to howard university um i was a painting major while i was in college and i did ordinary paintings just like other students would do and this was done in class it was a young lady who was sitting in the middle of the room and the studio classes were like three to four hours i think and you have a blank canvas and your professor the instruction is to paint that person so that this is what i did in a particular class and i like to show this piece because it shows that some of the ideas of what i'm doing now have been running through my mind and i've been repeating them through the years even 20 30 years later in this piece the young lady i'm layering her face again you're going to see those oranges and reds and yellows but instead of using fabric layers and this i'm actually using glazes of acrylic paint so my under painting and my layering techniques that i did with paint i'm just doing the same exact thing with fabric and it's just a different medium and the colors itself i just want to talk about that a little bit my professors at howard um the dean of the school of fine arts at howard was jeff donaldson who was the founder of this african um african-american artist collective that started out of chicago called africobra and afrocobra stan stood for the african coalition of bad and relevant artists it was started in the 60s in the south side of chicago jeff donaldson um frank smith was my professor wadsworth jarrow also taught at howard um still living member of africober his wife jay jarrell living member of africobra she does more with fiber she works with fibers and paints but she wasn't she wasn't ed howard but afrocobra had this philosophy that artists should be proud of who they are artists should um be speaking to their audience and their audience should be black people the people of the community and that our people should always feel proud of who they are they should learn something when they look at your artwork they should feel proud about their own features their hair and and the color scheme was their their way the afro cobra artists were african-american in the 60s so there's the black power movement that that is very strong it's picking up speed and this movement intersected and and up upheld and became a a way to market and publicize the philosophies of the black power movement as in black is beautiful the color schemes that they used were called the kool-aid colors and they were throwing away the bozar european color scheme where your palette had white on it and in order to light lighten the color you added white the afrocobra artist said we're not using white for anything as a matter of fact sometimes they would paint on a solid black canvas and if they were using a lighter canvas you could lighten we and then they taught that to us at howard if you wanted to lighten your artwork you had to use yellow light pink um what else could we use i suppose we could use a light orange um but we weren't allowed to have white on our palette at all so you see this was another painting that i did while in class it was just done on a piece of cardboard so anybody who knows cardboard after a while it starts to crumble because of the acid in it but in any case i couldn't afford canvas just had a regular piece of brown cardboard and this was another model who's in class and you can see the yellows and the reds you can even see greens in there and a little purple and burgundy so i'm using my same color scheme my subjects were still african-american people and and i was focused on showing people in a positive way from the beginning that was from what my professors told me and that was also what i was interested in individually and a lot of people ask me you know how was it that i ended up quilting like how did that all come in well while i was at school i had a professor by the name of al smith and al told me that i should dr um he told me that i should create artwork that look more like how i dress so right now i'm wearing like this african print um sort of like a little jacket but i'm wearing it as a dress um i dressed like that in college too this is in the 90s and i was always combining textures i remember one day i came in i had on combat boots i think they were the doc martens a lace skirt and like um i had an african print dashiki top and alan smith looked at me and i had been struggling with my artwork i told him how i'm not getting what i want out of my paintings my paintings are not expressing what i feel the way i effectively they looked flat to me they lacked the depth and alt told me why don't you use fabric it was like look at how you dress use the parts of you in your work that that you use so well you're always combining textures and colors and it looks funky it looks cool so what you're seeing on the screen and this is the first time i've ever shown this piece publicly um because i was so embarrassed for so long because you know everybody has to start somewhere and this was my very very very first exploration in using fabric in a way using fabric as a way as a medium using fabric to create portraits i made this one night i brought it to class the next day i remember being embarrassed to open it in class because al said he had given me a personal challenge he wanted me to show the rest of my peers the rest of my classmates i opened it up and this is what it was i was using velvet i was using um gosh i'm not sure what that type of it's not calico but it's a type of cotton lace i was using satin and i was just gluing and pasting at this point um also tell me to look at the art of ramir bearden look at the collages look at the art of alma thomas for color inspiration and take those ideas and try to try to synthesize them into my own my own creations and so this was my very first piece here and i am going to stop sharing that one because it is hard enough to show things that you've done a very very long time ago um so i should rewind a little bit just to say that i learned how to sew for my mother and my grandmother um they were not quilters in the least bit but they were women who sewed and loved to sew and this is a photo here of my grandparents just so you can see they my grandmother violet um grew up in new orleans louisiana born and raised and she used to sew all kinds of clothing she ended up having 10 children and my mother being one of those 10 and you know in that era women in that era mostly all american women and probably some men too so to supplement their their clothing choices it wasn't like now where clothing is so affordable you can go to walmart and buy an outfit for ten dollars in those days it was cheaper for them to sew an outfit than to buy it and so grandma violet and my mother taught me how to sew and i was selling my own clothes at howard as well and that was another reason why al smith said hey visa why don't you show us what is the real you and so this piece that's on the screen now is what i did while i was in grad school now this is a few years later at montclair state and i did a portrait of my grandmother and my grandfather based on the photo that i just showed you my grandfather was francis hammond and i wanted to start using fabric to describe a personality at the time i didn't realize that i was coming upon a new artistic philosophy i just was trying to make do with what i had which i think is so important you know we're always thinking that we have to buy something or get something in order to create something new when we have the skills that we need already we just need time to sort them out and i found with myself and a lot of people during this quarantine we've been using that time to sort of get back to what are those skills that we learned you know at home what were we taught at home and what are the things around us that we may have put aside and that now we should get back to my grandmother her name was violet so you can see on the border that i used i know i don't think those flowers are particularly violets but there's some sort of purple flower and i used that just to reinforce that that was her name at the time my grandmother was still living and this was my project that i used for my final this was my final presentation in grad school in my fibers class and i wanted to use primarily lace and floral fabrics on my grandmother to talk about her delicate personality how sweet she was how loving how kind when she had a really high voice and she was always cooking oatmeal in the morning and she was just a typical grandmother very loving to all of his children and my grandfather was a foreign embassy for morocco actually they raised their children including my mother and all her siblings in morocco so i tried to use a more like geometric somewhat african style print on my grandfather and this was my very first like successful quilted piece after that moment i knew that things that i knew that i had the ability then to create portraits just by using bits of cloth and i want to show you a piece that i did soon after that and i'll show these kind of a little bit more rapidly because i did an imagined image of my father's grandfather my father's father my grandfather my father's from ghana west africa and he his father passed away from appendicitis when he was about 11 or 12 years old and when that grandfather passed away my grandmother could not afford to feed and take care of her children on her own so the children which was five of them were kind of they were not kind of they were all split up after that and the family was effectively um decimated after the death of my grandfather my father was in boarding school so he went back to boarding school and now he had to live there um two of my father's sisters who were just little girls under the age of 10 were married to a grown man in his 50s or 60s both girls married to the same man um one of the other little brothers went with an uncle and my grandmother was able to i think take care of one baby and she stayed with that one baby so my grandfather's passing that ripple of his death and the loss of him has trickled all the way down to me all these years later i'm in school and i wanted to create a portrait of this grandfather who i'd never seen never known and there were no photos of him for me to even reference so i looked up an african-american man an image of a excuse me of an african northern ghanaian man and i found a reference photo and i thought okay i'm going to make a portrait based on this and this is why i was still in school but this time i asked my father for his dashikis so here i go again sort of creating this new philosophy of your fabric the fabric choices tell a story and i wanted african cloth i didn't have a lot of money i was in school so i thought i'll just use my father's dashikis but in essence i was using pieces of my father's life and also his actual dna when we wear our clothing our skin rubs on that clothing so the dna is infused but i didn't realize that at the time until i put it together i felt a certain a certain spirit and passion coming from this piece and so this is my imagined portrait of the grandfather i never knew and i called him grandpa zachary because zakani was their last name and i did that same portrait a few years it wasn't a few years later it was one year later so i showed this just to show the progression in my style i was getting more comfortable with cutting shapes i was getting more comfortable showing expression this is a portrait based on the same reference photo but in this in this case it's a year later i'm using almost some of the same fabrics and colors but i started incorporating silk um this is raw silk at the top of his head leather i used in his hat again i'm using my father's dashikis and then i was also using some of my grandmother's dresses so by that point i am becoming a lot more comfortable i had graduated from college and and from grad school itself and i started creating portraits based on my family and friends i asked all my friends to model for me to give me photos to to let me create images of them and i want to say that my community the african-american community really supported me at this time i didn't think you know i didn't set out like well i'm gonna become a professional artist doing this nor did i set out thinking that thinking that i'm only going to be creating images of black people i was creating images of the people in my life so this is these are two friends of mine nandi and natalie and natalie's on the on the right with the green and nandi is the more that pinks and fuchsias and after i graduated from montclair state i was i went to start teaching high school i taught in the north public schools for 10 years and then i taught and maplewood at columbia high school for three years so nandi and natalie i made while i was teaching and i made this image during the summer time and you can see that i'm really comfortable now using intricate cuts i'm really just going for it and i really enjoyed doing this particular piece because it was summer break that meant that i could spend as much time on it as i wanted to prior to that when i did portraits of um i used to do portraits of everybody by the way but my god daughters they i think almost all of them have a portrait done and my co-workers some of my good friends would pay me they would ask me hey can you do a portrait of me and my child can you do a portrait of my grandfather so i was making money on on the side but all of my pieces were only a certain size because i had lesson plans i had to wake up in the morning i had 25 to 30 students who were counting on me so i couldn't put my all into my artwork and this was an example of me just going all in early on um i think i made this piece somewhere around 2005 so i was able to do more when i had more time and as time went on i was making those pieces smaller ones but this piece is important to me because i made it uh just three years ago i think it was 2017. um all those years teaching and working and i got an opportunity to work with the clara oliver gallery um and claire oliver is a gallery based in harlem new york i still work with claire oliver and she called me and did a studio visit and said she'd like to exhibit my artwork and i had to think about now what am i gonna say to the world what art am i gonna put out here as a professional artist now am i still gonna show images of my family and friends like i wanted to expand that vision so i just started like googling and thinking and brainstorming and i thought okay let me just look up african-american just that term i came up with some images but they're all contemporary i found myself looking at black and white photos more and more and then i realized that all those years looking at my grandmother's black and white photos which i sort of skimped over but my grandmother was so important to me she didn't only just teach me to sew i spent a lot of time at her house when my parents were working she would be babysitting all of her little grandchildren and all of those old photo albums would be on her coffee table and i would ask her who is this who is that so i thought let me go back to looking at what i like vintage photos and this famous photo of the reference or the source photo for this image is by russell lee it was taken in the 1940s as a part of the farm securities administration and i stumbled upon it just googling african-american and then i sort of had to go back because the term that was used in those days was negro so when i looked up just the term negro and i thought okay i come across this image from the farm securities administration it opened up almost 40 000 images and i was floored none of the people were named by some some i shouldn't say none very few people were named i just would say this one was negro boys on easter sunday um and so they had so much swagger so much personality that i thought i'd love to recreate that as a quilt and this was my first life-size quilt these boys each one of them was the whole quilt itself was about maybe six feet high and about maybe nine feet wide so this is me really getting that being able to go all out and i want to say that a year after i met claire oliver i actually stopped teaching so then i could spend all of my days creating my artwork which is what i'm still doing now and i'll show you some of the images that i've been creating while working with claire oliver um this is a piece that i exhibited last february at the gallery i had my first solo exhibit in harlem and this the man on the left the reference photo you'll see his name was emmett scott and he actually was booker t washington's right hand man he was a newspaperman he was a reporter he was a writer he actually became the secretary of negro affairs for the african-american community or i should say the negro community at that time under president woodrow wilson and i love that proud demeanor the way he's looking down his nose at us the way his spectacles are perched on his nose so in my image i wanted to use color to talk about emmett scott's personality it seemed like he did seem like a cool cat in a way like a cool more calm personality but i also wanted to use that fuchsia and orange on him to show the contrast because this man yes he's he seems to be a cool personality but in order for him to this is in the times between the 1920s and 30s for in in order for him to be a successful learned black man at this time he had to have a lot of grit and a lot of strength of character and you see that in his expression and i was using color in my image in order to express that over his heart you'll see that i've used this circular pattern just to talk about the passion that this man had had and that that those that would sort of be my way of imitating sonar and the idea that he was a living breathing and passionate person and on his vest you'll see all these birds and that particular fabric is called the speed bird fabric speed bird is a popular african fabric and it it symbolizes wealth prosperity and movement and i thought what better things to describe a man like emmett scott so i'm using fabric now to still tell the story of of the people in the portraits but i'm also telling the story by using african fabric i am giving people back their heritage and identity recently i did a portrait of frederick douglass and we know who frederick douglass is again he was a name and a very known important orator he was a a advocate for feminism he was an abolitionist he was a man who taught himself to read and write well his the mistress who owned him helped teach him some of his letters and then he learned the rest from street kids playing with them and getting them these are white street kids getting them to show him different symbols of letters and numbers and sounding out words until he became completely literate he actually used that knowledge to forge his free papers and gain his own freedom when he was in his late 20s and i found this photo of frederick douglass and i have to say that i was taken aback i was not used to seeing frederick douglass as a young man and look at that cravat on him it's it's silk it's brocade i saw the waves in his hair so i realized that there was this whole side of frederick douglass there we all have been missing or at least i had been missing um the personality of frederick douglass not just the larger-than-life figure but frederick douglas the man and then as i studied the photo i realized that also he has this very stern look on his face he's a young man seemingly but he's got a look that is that i've rarely seen on a person and to look face to face with somebody who actually was a slave in their lifetime took me back took me aback i should say and as i zoomed in i noticed that his eyes were incredibly bloodshot and so i thought what life did this man have i had to reread his autobiography and go back and figure out what are the things about frederick douglass that i had glossed over in school this was my version of frederick douglass so i use the red a lot i talk about color as personality and as a way to communicate i wanted to show that that passion of frederick douglass i wanted to get that stern expression on his face i use the velvet for his hair because i like to explore and celebrate like the kinky hair textures that he wore his afro proudly fredrick douglas he was the son of this the man who owned him when he was a child so he was half white he could have easily put his hair in a in a clubbed it back in a little ponytail in those days you know added water and just made it smoother but he chose to leave it out and leave it bushy i used again the speed bird fabric on his vest to talk about his escape from slavery his prosperity later in life his quest for freedom and on his sleeves you'll see those abc gmo that fabric is called abcd fabric in ghana and actually in all of west africa it's called the abc fabric it was printed in the 1920s by this big fabric company called lisco and that fabric was used to celebrate that i am literate i can read and write i am proud and i'm educated so i thought what better use is what better use could i have for that than than to use it on frederick douglass himself and i would like you to see the full size image this was also life-size just so you can get an idea and then i had to use a composite image i have to say i couldn't find a full-size photo of frederick douglass standing up as a young man i found some as an older man but i couldn't find any of him standing and i also want to add that frederick douglass was known as the most photographed man of the 19th century that was his personal campaign to show african-american people as people who could be educated who should not be slaves i think at that time the predominant white thought was that black people were only three-fourths of a man so by him saying like i am a grown man i'm educated i have a right to my freedom all my people do and also i want to know that he never smiled in his photos because he said that he wanted people to understand that um it was not a light or happy thing to be enslaved by another person to be whipped between the inch of your life and to have to escape and live with that threat over your head as long as slavery was legal so all of the photos that he was he had taken i think the only person who was photographed more than him at the time might have been the queen of england um he made sure that he had this stern look and that his photos were just disseminated they were sold as postcards um people had them hanging up in their homes it wasn't that he just wanted to be a celebrity he was trying to get across the message black people are equal to anybody else so i would like to show you just a few of the pieces some of the pieces that i've worked on recently and i just want you to see this photo the quality is not that good but i just wanted you to see the scale of what i was doing or what i am doing for that matter um this is me with two friends it's with kimberly drew and then her other friend um if he's known as the ghetto gastro and i met up with them at the expo chicago this is 2019 and this piece was my largest to date although the piece i showed you all before the warns of other sons is a little bit larger but at the time this was the largest to date and it it is it depicts an african-american baseball team from so i'm going to show you the image this was the quilt it's called to truth and god it was a portrait of the morris brown baseball team morris brown was hbcu is an hbcu historically black college and university the photo was taken in 1899 the reference photo and it struck me because i thought i was looking at a photo from the negro leagues when i came across it and oh my goodness that one didn't pop up i thought that this photo was of the negro leagues but it actually wasn't uh it was taken in 1899 and i thought okay 1899 we're talking 37 years after slavery so these young men they're in their 20s their parents were slaves many of them unless they were free morris brown is in atlanta atlanta is strictly at that especially at that time southern i mean still southern state but it was a jim crow state segregated state their parents would have been forbidden to even learn how to read again or write anything and here they are they're not only in college but they're participating in the great american pastime which is baseball so how much how much more could they say that i want a seat at the table i want a part of the american dream i am these men could not even vote legal legally the 15th amendment was passed supposedly they could vote but there were all types of roadblocks set up for black people trying to vote all the way up until the 1960s when the voting rights act passed in 1965 so prior to that um black people were lynched there i mean there were whole towns that were burned to the ground when people tried to vote so these men could not vote they were drinking out of segregated fountains they were sitting in the back of the bus they were taking a subjugated role in these in this american life but they're still here striving for equality and for dignity and i love that this photo showed all of these different personalities i thought about who was the leader you know this young man sitting i thought maybe he's the captain of the team you know and i'd love that the little boy is there too because they're showing the way to this younger one and he was also included in the photo so he was important he was important and they wanted him to be there too talking about each one teach one they are leading the way and then the very last photo that i'd like to talk about is a piece that i did i shouldn't say photo but a quilt that i did is called kindred and i wanted to with this piece i wanted to celebrate african-american family i want to again show a slice of life that we are proud of and one thing that um is important to me is my community my family my children and so each piece that i'm doing yes i'm showing quilts of the african-american community but i'm also talking about all the time i'm always talking about what is it that i believe in what is it that's important to me what is it that i want to express so in this image i have a father and the mother and then the two daughters and if you look you can see that the father's feet are firmly planted so i wanted to show that he's holding up and supporting his entire family um i came with the reference photos this was a composite photo not all of these individuals were in the same photo together but i wanted to show that how important the father is to the family because the mother and the daughters were in one photo together but the caption it said father makes um i i have to check that again but it was in the sense father makes a dollar fifteen cents a week and he was away working at like turpentine a turpentine plant or factory and forgive me for not knowing the exact term but on on a on a farm where they where they extracted turpentine and he was away working the mother was home with the children she couldn't afford shoes for herself nor for her children but what i thought was so beautiful was that the mother and all zoom ins you can see but she had on these gold hoop earrings and so did her daughter one of the daughters had on earrings too she had a ring on so it was like yes these people are poor they may not be able to afford all of the things that they want but they do have dignity and they do have pride and they have vanity too and she wanted to look good in her photos too even though they didn't have a lot of money and the reason why i put the father in the photos because i want to dispel that myth of absence as if black fathers don't care about their children don't love their children my parents did eventually get divorced and me and my siblings want to live with my father and he's still very active in my life today so i always want to talk about how important the father is to the family and how black fathers do love and support their children and i wanted that to show in this piece that he not only supporting them but he's literally holding them all up and if we zoom in a little bit more on mother's apron you'll see those if you look close you'll see lemon slices in there and you can see a little bit of the cup at the bottom there it is it's a sippy but her apron was for me a reference to the beyonce album lemonade and a quote that i think her quote she got that from that it sounded like either her grandmother her husband's grandmother saying when life gives you lemons you create lemonade and i thought what a powerful way for me to reinforce this common thread with this family that they didn't have it easy they didn't have a lot of money but they were still doing the best they could and they were still making the best of what they had and i think that i can go out with one last look at a piece that i'm very proud of um i was recently given the honor of doing a magazine cover for time magazine the great wangari mathai she was the first african woman to win the nobel peace prize she was the first african woman on the continent to earn her doctoral degree and wangari mathai was an environmental activist she was a feminist she was she was from kenya i should say and she lived through the 1970s 1970s is when she became active she did pass away in the 1990s and i was given the honor of creating a portrait of wangari mathai for their women women of the year series um time magazine this past march put out a hundred covers of women who should have had the cover all the years and all the years that time magazine had been publishing and printing issues it was a little over 100 years i think 110 i think up to the 1990s they had had like 17 women on the cover um and or it could have been 27 but it was a very low number and so they wanted to do what they could to make up for that and so my image of wangari mathi she also was uh she was a green activist let me not forget that that was one of her main things she felt that she taught women to to plant and to farm their own lands and to reforest the country that she could help the entire population not just women because women were the ones who were taking care of the children and they were raising the future generations at the time kenya was being deforested and whangarei methi was responsible for helping and showing women how she was responsible for the planting of over 40 000 trees and so that's why i used that green fabric on her head to show the vegetation and her respect for the natural environment and i use that red again to show that she has this passion she seemed to be somebody who was very um very warm very passionate and she seemed to always be smiling so i really wanted to choose a photo that showed her showed her in that beautiful light and so this was the cover that i did and oh the trim around her shirt it says all women are united that was a new fabric that had recently been printed to celebrate march which was women's month so i thought it was the perfect fabric to use on a portrait of wangari mathai because it talked about her her strength her belief in the feminist movement and i and i was so proud to be able to make the cover and i also want to say thank you to all of you all for joining me today it's been a pleasure and i will be so happy to answer some of your questions about my artwork yes i do sketch my artwork before any piece i have a background with sewing my mother and my grandmother taught me to sew and they work from patterns so i still do that when i find a photograph that i find interesting or if i find a series of photos i sketch out who and what i want to combine and if there's anything that i want to change and i also the sketch that i do is contour line so that i'm looking at a black and white photo i'm creating just a line drawing so that i have i know every shape that i already want to cut out and the thing that takes so long for me is just the selecting of the fabrics themselves the actually choosing the photo takes a little bit of a while because i really want to connect with that photograph or the image of the person emotionally i want to be able to find something that i can draw out from the image and then the sketch is really very quick because that's contour line it doesn't have to be perfect and i used to tell my students that all the time when you're drawing it doesn't have to be perfect because you are putting out an impression of that person if you want for instance when i did the frederick douglass image if you want a perfect image of frederick douglass we have a photograph of him we can always just refer back to that but your sketch of that person is where you're putting your impression of frederick douglass so what do i think of him um what impressions do i get of him and when i sketch i'm putting those imperfections of myself in the photo and then by my selecting of the cloth it becomes very organic so yeah i think it's really important for people to know how to sketch but that they don't have to get so hung up that they're full that their drawings have to be photorealistic i envision people looking at my artwork in all sorts of settings you know i've always since i was in college i always had the idea that i wanted my artwork to be in galleries and museums and i wanted people to be able to buy my artwork and put it in their homes but then there's also that the afrocobra philosophy that was taught to me that art should be for everyone and most recently i've i had an opportunity to have my artwork muralized or actually it's being neuralized in conjunction with an exhibit that i have opening at the art institute of chicago um it opens november 16th and a mural is a beautiful thing because it's art for the people it's art for everyone it's going to be right in downtown chicago it's it's actually going to be on a billboard the mural so when people drive um ride by on the l or on on the train on elevated trains they'll see that mural so it's not just people who pay for their admission in a museum it's not just people who go into art gallery even thinking about art but anybody who happens to be passing by can see that artwork free of charge and they can just look at the images and get an impression of it and so they're getting something and i think it's important that i like both ideas you know i love having my artwork in museums i love people being able to buy my artwork put in their homes i love having my artwork in gallery but there's something really beautiful about art being for everyone and art for the people i only machine so uh the last piece i did it must have taken me um almost 700 hours to finish so i don't know how in the world i would never have finished it i probably would still be sewing right now i use a machine it's called it's a quilting machine it's called the long arm quilting machine and in that way your artwork is set on your quilt is on these rails and it sort of rolls it and a typical like a home sewing machine you push your fabric through like this with your hands so you're using a lot of hand strength and some arm strength there but my machine now since the fabric is set on rails the machine itself moves and the fabric is still and it's giving me so much more freedom of movement and the machine it's on these ball bearings so it's like smooth and easy i'm no longer like pushing through slowly just on my own arm strength alone um with this machine i can write words i can do lyrics of songs it just it's like an extension of my arm and just think about the muscles that you have in your arm versus what you have in your fingers they're grander movements they're stronger movements and you can see it in my arm because it's allowed me to make my my pieces 10 feet 10 feet wide and 12 feet long without taking um a year and a half or two years to finish the answer to that is kind of it's big because it's all over anywhere everywhere i can i order fabric from overseas a lot i use a lot of dutch wax fabric that's the african fabric that you'll see very prominently in my artwork and it's called dutch wax because it's actually made in holland one of the biggest manufacturers of dutch wax fabric is this company called lisco they've been making the fabric since the 1840s and i think it was originally made in harlem like harlem in holland um which is interesting because now i'm based in a gallery that's in harlem and i also get fabric from london i get fabric from ghana textiles company that's in ghana i get actually the fabric that i get in london is uh from a nigerian uh batik or it's like it's nigerian tie dye that i buy from this company in london and then i go to that ordinary fabric store down the street from me um don't discount that um there's beautiful fabric of all kinds i love the intersection of american fabric and and foreign or african fabrics or indian fabrics i like the idea of lace and silk and cotton combined with denim and leather and and wool so i'm interested in different varieties of textures and colors and luckily i do live about 30 minutes out of new york city so the garment district is an invaluable resource i can start on one block just go for like five or six bucks just popping in and out of fabric stores and then i'm getting a little bit of everything and to get african fabric to get a wide variety of african fabric the best place for me living where i live is to go to harlem and that's known uh one section is called little senegal and they have bunches of of african fabric stores that i can pop in and out and just buy fabric by the yard so i'm interested in all kinds oh and let me not forget i love vintage fabric as well um not all vintage fabric but my i have a good friend she gave me a bunch of victorian lace that was actually saved by her jewish grandmother in europe in the victorian era they were handkerchiefs and like i don't know i've never seen it before but there are little pouches where people carried their handkerchiefs in and those were lace and satin silk as well she gave me a whole bag of those handkerchiefs so i can also use those and incorporate those vintage fabrics into my artwork

Channel: Smithsonian American Art Museum

Views: 14,330

Rating: 4.9905214 out of 5

Keywords: Smithsonian, American, Art, Museum

Id: SsVT3v_AdTU

Length: 56min 14sec (3374 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020