In the News
The New York Times
From 2 Artists, 2 Ways to Tell Stories of Black America
Ms. Warren organized “Bisa Butler: Portraits,” opening Nov. 16 at the Art Institute. Ms. Butler, based in New Jersey, works in fabric, creating complex quilted textile portraits of what she calls the Black American story. It’s the museum’s first textile solo show for a Black female artist.
cbs Saturday Morning
Artist Bisa Butler on creating new narratives through portrait quilts
hyperallergic
Bisa Butler’s Worlds in Cut Cloth
The 22 quilts in Butler’s current exhibition are nothing less than dazzling. Their bold patterns undulate in delicate waves of cut cloth. You can almost hear the art museum’s doors creaking open a bit wider to invite these conventional quilts inside with their foreign vocabulary of batting, backing, stitching.
the New York Times
New & Noteworthy Visual Books
Bisa Butler: Portraits edited by Erica Warren. (Yale University)
Artnet News
Studio Visit: Rising Textile Art Star Bisa Butler
“The curators who really impress me are Thelma Golden, Ashley James (the first African American curator at the Guggenheim), Larry Ossei-Mensah, Naima Keith, Destinee Ross Sutton (who is only 25), and Michele Wije and Erica Warren, who curated my very first museum exhibits at the Katonah Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, respectively. Erica and Michele made me see my work in a whole new light and inspire me to reach for new heights.”
Architectural Digest
Relationships Are at the Heart of This New Bauhaus Exhibition
In this centennial year of Bauhaus celebrations, the world is not wont to culminating retrospectives and hyper-specific homages. Nevertheless, the crux of the institution's legacy arguably lies not in the work created within its architectural walls, but rather in the fact that as a school, it spread its message far and wide, like pollen into the wind.
This concept is at the heart of "Weaving Beyond the Bauhaus," a new exhibition set to open August 3 at The Art Institute of Chicago.
The New York Times
Critic’s Pick
“In a Cloud,” “Weaving beyond the Bauhaus,” and the Museum of Modern Art’s “Taking a Thread for a Walk,” one of that museum’s reopening shows, all convincingly propose fiber art as an entry into a canon that was long overdue for revision. Even better, they do so without slotting the weaving women into the same old heroic mode. It’s fine to be part of a talented crowd! All great art doesn’t need to be influenced by Europe! It is possible to be both beautiful and useful! There is indeed design in everything.
Artsy
The Women Weavers of the Bauhaus Have Inspired Generations of Textile Artists
The power of this show lies in its ability to connect innovation with collaboration. Across the exhibition, curator Erica Warren highlights not only the individual contributions of each artist, but also the mentorships and friendships that bolstered them. “Women supporting women”—to borrow a contemporary tagline—is its subplot. “I find that it’s really valuable to look at relationships between groups of artists,” Warren explained, “and the role that educational institutions, museums, galleries, and professional and personal affiliations play in bringing artists together and really impacting their practices. I wanted to tell a story about that.”
Selvedge
Review - Super/Natural
“An exhibition that offers a dazzling, in-depth look at five historical cultures dating back to around 500 BC – the Paracas, Nazca, Chancay, Lambayeque and Rimac – as well as artists in modern-day southern Peru and northern Bolivia”
Art Institute of Chicago
Meet the Staff
"How would you encourage visitors to look at and think about textiles in the museum?
I entreat all visitors to find their own point of entry. Whether it is a straightforward appreciation of textiles’ aesthetic qualities, an understanding of and respect for the technical aspects of making, a fascination with history and the role of textiles as material objects that have shaped lives, or some other avenue that speaks to their particular experiences or frame of reference, textiles invite everyone to look closely and think carefully.
NPR
Black Lives Are Celebrated In Bisa Butler's Extraordinary, Technicolor Quilts
At the top of the Grand Staircase at the Art Institute of Chicago hang massive, colorful banners announcing the art work of Bisa Butler. Butler's specialty is fabric, specifically quilts. And the bold images of Black people she stitches together, using textiles like paint in an explosion of color, is quilting transformed.
"I describe my artwork as a quilted photo album of a Black family. But it's the Black diaspora family," says Butler, standing in the exhibition hall and overlooking her work. She explains that some of the people depicted in her photo album are well known, others just ordinary folk often overlooked. No matter. All are celebrated.
Chicago Tribune
Art Institute reopens with its own Van Goghs plus Monet, Bisa Butler exhibitions
. . .even more intriguing about the Art Institute’s reopening offerings is the new “Bisa Butler: Portraits” show . . . Not only are Butler’s grand-scale quilted “canvases” extraordinary expressions of African-American life, but in a notion that you don’t typically find at Art Institute shows, she and her DJ husband created a Spotify playlist to go with the her works.
Chicago Sun Times
In bright colors, at life-size scale, artist Bisa Butler portrays everyday people — on quilts
The exhibition features 22 of Butler’s quilts, including “The Safety Patrol,” which the Art Institute acquired in 2019. The 7½-foot-wide work depicts a determined school crossing guard protecting six fellow pupils. According to Warren, it has become an “instant icon” in the museum’s textile collection with multiple appealing qualities.
“That’s one of the great things about Bisa’s work,” the curator said. “It can be so very many things, and it offers so many different stories and points of entry. And that is why it has already proven to be so popular and Bisa is seeing such a strong flourishing of her career.”
Chicago Sun Times
Black Chicagoans flock to Bisa Butler, Obama portrait exhibits as museums rise to racial reckoning
Last weekend, as I experienced the Bisa Butler and Obama Portraits with a sea of Black visitors, I couldn’t help but think of the impact these self-reflecting works could have on young people in disadvantaged South and West Side communities, where I am always blown away to learn some have never been downtown.
As cultural institutions rise to this moment, they must continue to examine what is on their walls, and work on redefining the precept of art history.
Chicago Magazine
Bisa Butler Reimagines Textile Portraiture
Butler’s expressiveness is palpable in Bisa Butler: Portraits, her first-ever solo museum show, which runs through April 19 at the Art Institute of Chicago (after a previous stop at the Katonah Museum of Art in Westchester County, New York).
The exhibition caps a remarkable two-year rise for Butler. Erica Warren, the Art Institute’s associate curator of textiles, first encountered Butler’s quilts at 2018’s Expo Chicago. “I was stopped dead in my tracks,” Warren recalls. “It was unlike anything I had seen before. Her amazing command of the materials to produce a kind of trompe l’oeil effect, a tricking of the eye, is unbelievable.”
Artnet News
10 Critically Acclaimed Art Exhibitions We Wish We Saw in 2020 But Weren’t Able to Because… You Know
Figurative compositions in boldly unconventional color combinations, made entirely of quilted fabrics, they were a powerful argument for the worth of a traditionally marginalized medium. Butler uses thousands of tiny pieces of vibrantly patterned African fabrics to create striking portraits based on historical photographs of Black men, women, and children, celebrating both African American quilting traditions and Black identity.
The Art Newspaper
Art Institute of Chicago show traces the Bauhaus’s legacy in 20th-century textile art
“The Bauhaus isn’t just about 1919 to 1933 in Germany—it’s about this dispersal of artists, and their own development and progression, and their exchanges with students, and their collaborations with their colleagues and students, and the kind of reciprocal nature of all of these experiences,” says Erica Warren, the Art Institute of Chicago’s assistant curator of textiles, who organised the show.
Weaving Beyond the Bauhaus traces these networks through the artists’ own perspectives, eschewing descriptive wall labels for wall text of their own words. “They’re talking about one another and they’re talking about seeing each other’s work, and they’re talking about experimentation and how they’re carrying this idea from the Bauhaus,” Warren says.
Hyperallergic
Relationships Woven Through Textiles at the Bauhaus
Weaving beyond the Bauhaus looks at the intersecting connections and relationships that took root at the Bauhaus’s weaving workshop and continue to unfurl today.
By focusing on personal connections, Weaving beyond the Bauhaus challenges prevalent art-world narratives of the lone-wolf genius (often male), who mythically springs forth fully formed without outside help or influence. In contrast, the exhibition illuminates the ways that textile art has evolved over the last century — not in a vacuum, but through collaboration and the exchange of techniques and ideas.
Ancient History Encyclopedia
Interview - Super/Natural: Textiles of the Andes
A new exhibition - Super/Natural: Textiles of the Andes - at The Art Institute of Chicago, showcases the beauty and importance of these ancient textiles. In this exclusive interview with co-curators Elizabeth Pope (Arts of Africa and the Americas) and Erica Warren (Textiles) from The Art Institute of Chicago, James Blake Wiener of Ancient History Encyclopedia (AHE) learns more about the prominent position of textiles within pre-Columbian Andean cultures.
NBC News
10 must-see Latino art shows in 2019
The Art Institute’s exhibition will include more than 60 Andean textiles and a small selection of ceramics from the museum’s collection, which will together explore the development of distinct Andean cultures and their approaches to design.
National Geographic
A (Subversive) Exhibit of Kitchen Culture
Tupperware, Warren would argue, can be seen as a metaphor for being contained. The plastic bowls with their snap tops maintain order, keeping everything in the kitchen in its place—including the homemaker.