Bisa Butler: (Detail) Africa The Land Of Hope and Promise For Negro People's of the World (2019). Quilted portrait of Emmett J. Scott. Reworked with face paints and African wax fabric off cuts. Rediscovering #blackportraiture through #gettymuseumchallenge. #gettychallenge THREAD

Emmett J. Scott was a journalist, government official and envoy, educator, and author. He was Booker T. Washington's chief aide at the Tuskegee Institute.

“Bisa Butler’s work originates from the idea of absence. The subjects for her quilts tend to be anonymous, sometimes given little more than a designation of “Negro,”

which is the search term she plugged into one of the Library of Congress’s photographic databases to find some of her source material.

Fusing figuration with collage for the pieces in her current exhibition at the @KatonahMuseum, she used vividly patterned African fabrics to create large-scale images of Black people, reconstructing their stories and seemingly riffing on a Black tradition of oral histories

that take shape through their retelling.
Her work evokes the poignant, generations-old legacy of quilting in the Black community, made famous by the women of Gee’s Bend.” (From NY Times) Read more about Bisa Butler here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/bisa-butler-stitches-together-quilts-african-american-experience-180975397/