“He didn't understand that if you don't tell Black kids in this country their hair is beautiful, their skin is beautiful, that they won't think so,” she says. She explains that her father, who immigrated from Ghana, hadn’t experienced the United States the way a Black American would. Photography by Margaret Fox.Īfter being a “child under the Rainbow” and a brief stint at Chad School, an Afrocentric day school, Bisa finished her pre-college education with primarily white peers. This piece was a love letter to them, it was me saying ‘I am you.’” Bisa Butler, Southside Sunday Morning, 2018.
“I wanted to stand out, but I also wanted to say something to the Black community. “I was told the crowd there was very savvy-old families, serious collectors,” she says. Her platform first grew by way of a Russell Lee photograph of five Black boys on Easter morning on view at a renowned Expo in Chicago. Today, you can still find the same blues, greens, purples and pinks comprising the Black skin of figures in Bisa’s renowned quilted portraits-the colors have melded together to become the likes of Questlove, Tarana Burke and Chadwick Boseman. And when people saw the portrait, they were like, ‘This is amazing.’” “My teacher had told me that when you mix all the crayons, you get black… so I took a handful of, like, 10, and mixed them for hours. “I remember once I made this portrait of myself, but there was no black crayon,” she recounts. Bisa found herself in art class melting together crayons. Taught in a remodeled Victorian house, the school’s curriculum model was one where students could choose how they spent their days. Growing up in the hippiedom of the 1970s, Bisa Butler started her education at The Rainbow School in Plainfield, New Jersey.
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