When you look at my work, you are looking at what I want to show you, and how I feel that black people want to be seen. So, if you were to go into a home, and ask to see a family photo album, those are the type of photos you are going to see. Moments that people are proud of.”
As Butler moves her artwork in new directions, the most radical change has occurred with regards to her inspiration. Photographs are still key to her process. “I could not do my work without photographs,” she says. As always, she begins with a photograph that moves her, that inspires that sense of dignity she brings to the final product. From there she creates a line drawing of the image to explore the values from the whitest whites to the darkest darks and every shade between. The sketch becomes her dressmaker’s pattern as she builds the fabrics of the quilt to create her signature sense of depth and illumination. The process remains the same, though the sources have shifted in a way that Butler considers fundamental.
For most of the last two decades that Butler has practiced quilting, the photographs that begin her process have mostly come from archives and databases. The vintage photos from these government and private collections sometimes featured famous faces (see “The Storm, the Whirlwind, and the Earthquake,” her portrayal of Frederick Douglass), but mostly we see folks whose faces have drifted through time: captured in a photograph, but anonymous.
So much of her practice has been devoted to researching these people. Sometimes Butler uncovers their life stories (as with her “Don’t Tread on Me, God Damn, Let’s Go!,” depicting a group of soldiers known as the Harlem Hellfighters), although sometimes the end of her research is an understanding of what people like the ones in the
photos might have lived like—their struggles and ambitions, their hopes, and their stumbling blocks.
“I’ve been experimenting lately with living photographers,” Butler says. “That is part of my new interest that started during the pandemic. As history was unfolding, these tragic events—all around us and right in front of me—I wanted to concentrate on the history I was in. So I decided that I wanted to create some works concentrating on photographers that were living in this century. It is incredibly rewarding for me to be able to speak to photographers whose work I have admired for years.”
These collaborators include the likes of Jamel Shabazz, Janette Beckman, and Malike Sidibe.
Butler continues, “Jamel Shabazz is a genius and a legend for me, as a person who grew up with hip hop. Being able to hear about their travels and experiences with their subjects has brought accuracy and relevance to my work that I wouldn’t be able to get before. I am able to choose fabrics that specifically reflect the life of the subjects, and of the photographers because of what they share with me. For instance, I’m now privy to information like the subjects’ names, occupations, and even personalities. Before I could take an educated guess but it is the difference between a fictional novel and a biography. One is based in fact and the other would be a realistic fiction.”
Working directly with these photographers also means that Butler is telling far more recent stories, focusing on the 1960s or so to present. And here we have the reason for all the new fabrics injected into her work. Different tools for different times. Polyesters for the ‘60s and lamés for the ‘70s. Faux fur for the climate-conscious eco-warrior. Holographics and metallics for the nuclear age. Fabrics that hint at how modern life has become synthetic, bombastic, and fully customized.
Whether Butler is looking into the deep past or the near present, her work has always featured undercurrents of autobiography. When it comes to the source material, she says, “Unconsciously, I am drawn to my family’s photos.”
One day her father pointed out that every image of a family always featured two daughters and one son. “I didn’t even notice until he pointed that out,” she says. This mirrors the exact makeup of Butler’s household from her youth, before her father remarried. “I recreate that a lot.”
Butler believes that the images she makes today reflect those images that she grew up alongside. The family portraits of her mother, father, and siblings. The snapshots from her grandmother’s photo album, which showed a thriving Black middle-class in New Orleans. Perhaps that helps explain her fascination with hardworking, blue-collar people, her urge to show them at their strongest, if not their happiest.
