[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with me. Earlier this year, a fantastic documentary came out. It's called Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. Robert Caro is the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer whose work sheds new light on people like Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. Robert Gottlieb also had a storied career. He was editor-in-chief at Knopf, Simon & Schuster, and the New Yorker, and he was Robert Caro's longtime editor.

The documentary was directed by Gottlieb's daughter, Lizzie and explores the two men's 50-year long working relationship and their efforts to finish one final book. As you may have heard or read, Robert Gottlieb died yesterday, June 14th at the age of 92. On tomorrow's show, we'll air our conversation with his daughter. Make sure to listen, and if you haven't seen the documentary, Turn Every Page, it is an absolute delight. It is streaming now. That is in the future, but let's get this hour started with a spectacular new show named after this song from Nas.

[The World Is Yours, By Nas, playing]

When you walk into the Jeffery Deitch Gallery on Wooster Street, you'll see colorful depictions of historical figures and some faces you may recognize. They aren't paintings or photos, but intricately constructed quilts depicting Black life, joy in history. The work is often inspired by the photos, by the likes of Gordon Parks or Jamel Shabazz. In the corner of these huge elaborate works, you'll see the carefully stitched cursive signature of the artist, Bisa Butler.

Butler whose work has been displayed internationally is a local artist from South Orange New Jersey, who grew up with a long line of women who were sewers, and who made clothes that they could expertly mimic high-end designers like Dior. Before dedicating herself as a full-time artist, she spent more than 10 years in New Jersey public schools as an art teacher. Bisa Butler: The World Is Yours, the title of which was inspired by that Nas song, is on view at the Jeffery Deitch Gallery, at 18, Wooster street through June 30th. Bisa Butler is with me in studio. Welcome, Bisa.

Bisa Butler: Thank you so much for having me, Alison. I am so happy to be here with you.

Alison Stewart: I'm excited to talk to you about your work. When you first walk in the gallery, we meet a piece. It's Harriet Tubman, it's called The General. It's a very familiar pose. People will recognize, we've seen the picture. Her hands, she's looking directly, her hands are folded one over the other. What did you want to take from that classic silhouette of Harriet Tubman, and then expand on?

Bisa Butler: Harriet Tubman is such a large figure in my life. She has been my lodestar, or that example of what is a human being, and what should we want to do for others, unlike just for ourselves. Creating a portrait of Harriet meant that I had to pay homage to her and respect her as a woman and as a human being. It was really important for me to get that piece done.

Alison Stewart: You blend colored patterned bright backgrounds underneath. There's layers of fabric that are used, so many for a piece. How do you go about choosing and blending your colors and your patterns? Is it something that it just come to you, or are you someone who plans everything out beforehand? How does it work?

Bisa Butler: I try to plan ahead of time, but it doesn't seem to work. I choose, like you mentioned, the photographs are really important to me. I was lucky enough to have a Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship. Having a Gordon Parks' photo as the source is a tremendous story in itself. Then I choose the colors based on what emotion I want to exude or express with that piece. If somebody looks powerful or fierce, I might use reds or oranges, colors that make you think of fire, passion, and possibly even anger. If I think the person looks more chill or calm, I might use blues and aquas, something to make you think of cool water.

Then from there, I choose a lot of African cloth. My father is from Ghana, and I grew up looking at African prints. The African prints come with stories. For instance, if I did a portrait based on a Gordon Parks' photo called Department Store 1956, where it's a young woman standing with a small child in front of a door, and above their heads is a sign that says, "Colored entrance," and With that, you see worry on the woman's face, you see some sort of consternation. I put the blue on there because blue for me, is a contemplative color.

Alison Stewart: It's her skin tone that's blue, we should point out.

Bisa Butler: It's her skin tone that's blue. Different shades of silk, cotton, velvet, I use denim. I use all these layers like a painter would. Instead of layers of paint, I'm using layers of fabric in order to express the emotion.

Alison Stewart: I put a picture of that on my Instagram and someone said, "Is that a photo?" Somebody wanted to know, "Is that a real picture?" I was like, no, it's actually fabric and quilt. Now I put a close-up so that people could see the texture to it. This is, asking you talk about your own work in this way, but what do you think the texture adds to the story?

Bisa Butler: Oh, gosh. Thank you for asking that, because I feel, and to diss to all the painters out there, but I feel like I have an edge, because we all understand fabric. You're wearing a beautiful floral, butterfly pattern dress, I'm wearing a green pattern, but we understand fabric. Nobody approaches my work thinking, oh, I don't understand this art, what does it mean?

If I'm using velvet, silk and sequins on a portrait, you're going to get an idea of, when do you see those fabrics, and what I'm trying to say. If I do a portrait of an elderly person, let's say African American, and I use burlap, denim, and worn flannel, then you understand what I'm saying about their life, and you already know what that fabric feels like. When people look at my work, they don't feel I don't have a right to have an opinion. They know that they understand it.

Alison Stewart: I saw an image of, I think it was your dining room or your kitchen?

Bisa Butler: Yes, my dining room.

Alison Stewart: There's a lot of fabric.

Bisa Butler: Yes, I worked in my dining room all my whole life, all the way up until last August. For this first time, it's almost a year now I have a proper professional studio. Before then, that dining room table was the source in the home. I would be working on one end and my daughters would be doing their homework on the other end.

Alison Stewart: That is such a beautiful memory for them to have.

Bisa Butler: Yes. They grew up watching their mother work. I was a classroom high school art teacher, and they grew up also seeing my students. Knowing how passionate I was about art and also that belief that if you work hard, put good things in the world, you watch and see what good things come back to you. They're seeing the evidence of that now that my show was open with the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, like you mentioned. They see that mom's hard work did have a fruitful bounty at the end of it.

Alison Stewart: What is the most exotic fabric you've worked with, or one that was just super lush, and you were so excited to be able to work with it?

Bisa Butler: I was lucky enough to get a whole box full of Gucci and Louie Vuitton scraps. The real deal. That was super lush, because that fabric is woven. You can tell the quality of it now that I know the difference between the knockoffs and the real deal based on how they're made. I also bought this amazing rhinestone fabric right at Mood, my [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: Oh, Mood's the best.

Bisa Butler: That fabric was almost $800 a yard, with the Austrian crystal rhinestones stitched on it. I just got the smallest piece that I could afford, but I had to get a piece of that.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Bisa Butler. We're talking about her new show, The World is Yours, which is on view at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery at 18 Wooster street up through June 30th. We just put up a few pictures from the exhibition on our Instagram @allofitwnyc, so you can go check out what we're talking about. You have to really see them. They're really beautiful. They're big.

Bisa Butler: They're really big.

Alison Stewart: They're really big. How big, for example, was the Harriet Tubman?

Bisa Butler: The Harriet Tubman quilts is about 9 feet tall and about 5 feet wide. I started working at first-- like I mentioned I was a teacher and I'd be working on my table. Your work, a lot of artists, it's determined by the space you have. The space in front of me was the size of a poster, like 18 by 24. That's what I worked in. Since I moved into my studio, I have 15-foot ceilings and wide floors, so I was like, why not go big? I find that I'm comfortable working one-to-one, so little life size or a little bit larger than that.

I like being able to have the figures, as people look at the show, have the figures look at them directly in the eye, because when you think about it, whether it's Harriet Tubman or an unknown person from a Gordon Parks' photo, but when was the last time you were able to look at somebody whose life was like theirs directly in the eye and have you contemplate? What did it feel like to be them? It's almost like they're looking back at you and it makes you have an emotional response because you're having a moment with Harriet Tubman.

Alison Stewart: The title of the show is The World Is Yours. We mentioned the Nas song. We played the Nas song. Why does this phrase feel relevant for this show?

Bisa Butler: The World is Yours, or Nas himself is an artist that I grew up listening to. My husband, John, is a hip hop DJ. We share a studio and he plays music often while I'm working. The theme for this exhibit came from me listening to that song and thinking about the words that he was saying. I feel that within this society, a lot of times there's a gigantic gaslight and it goes on making people think that they're powerless and they don't have power, but it's my belief that the masses and it's the people who have the power

Not the government or powers that be. I love that refrain. Whose world is this? The world is ours so that we can all feel responsible, we can all feel empowered and we can all feel that we can make a difference. I chose a lot of images for the show with people who were just owning their power. They look fabulous, they look great. It starts with Harriet Tubman, but one of the youngest images of people in this exhibit is a young boy named Asante Kurume from the Congo.

Asante is a young dandy or sapper, and he is so fly. Hopefully, you all will get a chance to see it, because the Congo may be one of the poorest countries in the world, but based on his attitude and the power coming out of him, you see that this boy is a billionaire. Look, I'm sure he'd be happy to have the money but he doesn't need the money to prove his self-worth.

Alison Stewart: There is this fabulous enormous Salt-N-Pepa recreation. For you, what did they represent?

Bisa Butler: Oh gosh. What did Salt-N-Pepa represent? They were everything. I remember when Push It came out. Do you remember that?

Alison Stewart: [hums Push it]

Bisa Butler: [laughs] Yes.

Alison Stewart: I'll just background a noise for you.

[laughter]

Bisa Butler: Absolutely. Thank you very much, because that's what it was. I remember the day at Columbia High School when Push It came out. They changed the landscape of what it was to be a young Black teenager or female, a young Black woman. Still to this date, they are the first platinum-selling female rap group. I challenged my audience and your listeners too, what other platinum or gold-selling female rap group has more than two members even now? Salt-N-Pepa were feminists. They were sex-positive, they were about empowerment, and they represented everything that we wanted to be at that time. Beautiful.

Alison Stewart: They were authentic.

Bisa Butler: Authentic.

Alison Stewart: That's what I remember.

Bisa Butler: Exactly. Authentic, tough, beautiful, tender, and they were super stylish. When you see my Salt-N-Pepa quilt, it's based off of a photo by Janette Beckman, which was the cover of their album. They had the dapper jean jackets, the biker pants or the tight pants, riding boots, door knocker earrings, we call them dooky fat chains. They had all of the looks that we wanted to have.

Alison Stewart: It's really cool, some of the fabric you picked. The actual image in the fabric, or did you sew the image in of the earrings? That's in the leggings.

Bisa Butler: I'm so glad you mentioned that, because my neighbor at my studio, another artist named Gary Lichtenstein, is a world-class printmaker. He actually printed the images of the doorknocker earrings on African fabric for me, and then I stitched over that. You've got this double image of the printed doorknocker earring, and then I've actually contoured and stitched that in thread so it stands out even more.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Bisa Butler, the artist. Her exhibition, The World is Yours, is on view at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery at 18 Worcester Street through June 30th. Tell me about the women who taught you to sew.

Bisa Butler: The women who taught me to sew. My mother and my grandmother were so dear to me. They were both born in New Orleans, as was all of my grandmother's relatives prior or from 1700's until the present. As you know, New Orleans has a Black Creole history, and the way you looked and the way you left your house said a lot about your social status. They were very much a society where they were free Blacks for a very long time. They were coming from that plantation system but wanting to represent themselves at the best they could as people of worth and people of value.

When you left your house, very important to look a certain way. They sewed using silks, laces, gabardine, velvet. I grew up watching them emulate all of the top designers of the day. When I started making quilts, the remnants I received were dressmaker remnants. That's why when you see my quilts now, you'll see, like I mentioned the rhinestones, you'll see lace, and you'll see velvet. Those are not typical quilt-making fabrics. Those are dressmaker's fabrics. By using those, I'm paying homage and remembering my grandmother and my mother. Then when I'm using African fabric, I'm thinking about my Ghanaian side of the family.

Alison Stewart: What was a sewing lesson that they taught you which still serves you to this day?

[laughter]

I bet I know what it is. I'm going to hear what you--

Bisa Butler: I thought I was so fly. I made this dress. Who was I trying to look like? It was between Eve and Janet, and Iman, and Naomi Campbell. I got this white linen and cowrie shells. I made this dress that had a choker necklace on top. It was all white linen and it was like a column dress, went down to my ankles. I was so proud of this dress. I showed it to my grandmother and she told me that it was sewn completely wrong, not on the [unintelligible 00:17:11] and the hems were crooked, and the zipper was crazy. I was like, "Grandma, nobody's going to pay attention to that. It's fine. When I wear it, they're not going to notice." I was spending the night at her house. I went to bed and when I woke up the next morning, my grandmother had taken that entire dress apart and sewed it back together the right way-

Alison Stewart: Yes, she did.

Bisa Butler: -because she could not stand to think that I would leave the house with an improperly sewn garment.

Alison Stewart: My mom, she was always, she taught me to sew, "Measure twice, cut once."

Bisa Butler: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: Can't put it back.

Bisa Butler: Cannot. My grandmother took out every stitch by hand. I never forgot that because what does that say about how she cares about me, how she cares about appearance, how she cares about her craft? When I work, I think about this, like, will Grandma Violet approve of this or not?

Alison Stewart: So glad you said her name. I wanted to know her name. Grandma Violet. She's in all of our hearts today. You got a degree in fine arts from Howard, is that right?

Bisa Butler: Yes, that's right.

Alison Stewart: Did you always knew you were going to pursue art? Did you show up in DC and think, I'm going to be an artist?

Bisa Butler: Always. I was born in the '70s and my mother was, I wouldn't call her a hippie. She was more like a Afrocentric hippie-ish person who was searching for identity. That's a long term but she allowed me and my siblings to dream and to-- We did go to hippie school. Anybody who went to Children under the Rainbow School in Plainfield New Jersey knows. We had no classrooms. You had a classroom, you could determine in the day what class you felt like being in. If you wanted to spend the whole day in math class from morning to three o'clock, you could, or if you wanted to spend the whole day in the art class, you could.

I spent all my days in the art room and my sister literally spent all her days in the math room. You stayed in Rainbow School until age 12. It was their philosophy that by the time you reached 12, you would've spent enough time in all of the different rooms to have a well-rounded education. We only stayed there one year because my father wasn't having it. I said my mother was the searcher. My father was a typical Ghanaian man who went to Catholic school and then studied in London.

The Children under the Rainbow wasn't really fitting the bill, but I thought since that age, which is about four, that I would be an artist. My father did indulge me, along with my mother, because I was the youngest, so I was allowed to be whatever. I know my father told me recently that he did think he may have to financially support me for the rest of my life, but he still gave me space in order to be.

Alison Stewart: Did your sister stick with math?

Bisa Butler: She did not. Actually [laughs] she is a social worker in Montclair, New Jersey. Souki- Her name is Souki- ahe loved people. She still loves people. I was in the art room all day and I still love art. All the parents out there, your children do start showing you who they are in preschool or in schools with no grades like Rainbow. It helps if you support their interests.

Alison Stewart: Bisa, when you were in school, who was a teacher or a mentor who believed in you and made you believe in you?

Bisa Butler: My art teachers are really the ones who I think about all the time. I went to the Chad School in Newark, New Jersey. I remember I had this beautiful art teacher who had tiny hoop earrings that got bigger and bigger, and bigger as you went up her ear into a huge hoop earring. I'm looking at this gorgeous Black woman with all these gold rings, and I love to be by her side.

Then in high school, I don't want to not shout out Mr. Mckim from Columbia High School, and Mr. Struthers, who were the two AP studio art teachers who helped me all through my life. Actually I went back and taught at my alma mater, Columbia High School, and it was my art teacher, Mr. Mckim, who had kept in touch with me and called me one day, and he was like, "Bisa, do you want my job?" I was like, "Absolutely, I do." I ended up teaching in the room where I was once a student.

Alison Stewart: What did that feel like?

Bisa Butler: Oh my gosh. It was so cool. It's funny, the first day of school when I walked in, you know how they say smell brings so much memory. I actually felt like cutting school that minute when I walked in. It brought back senior year when all you want to do is cut class. I was like, I can't cut. I am the teacher. [laughs] I must go in the room. I loved it. It was a real full circle moment for me to see the children as I once was and try to give and pour into them as much as Mr. Mckim and Mr. Struthers did for me.

Alison Stewart: Unsolicited, we got this tweet "Bisa Butler's work is the BEST," capital letters, "BEST art I've seen in 15 years. So deep and beautiful, and full of heart. Thank you for this conversation."

Bisa Butler: Thank you so much. That is so kind. I love what I'm doing. I love teaching and I feel through my quilts that I'm still able to teach. I get a lot of messages from schoolchildren. The other day at the gallery I met a whole class of fifth graders who had studied me in a unit and they were all asking me questions.

Alison Stewart: Oh, what did they want to know?

Bisa Butler: Oh, I have a piece called The Princess. It's a little girl. First of all, they asked me, where is she? As in, where's the quilt and where's the girl because they saw themselves in her. I had to tell them, this is actually my friend, Fiona. She's a grown woman and she's got five children of her own. They were just fascinated by that fact that this little girl they've been focusing on is a mom and a nurse now, a successful nurse. It was really lovely to be able to have those interactions with the kids again, even though I'm not in the classroom.

Alison Stewart: We hear about so many arts programs being cut due to financial concerns. What would you say if you had to stand up and testify at a school board meeting to keep art alive?

Bisa Butler: I feel that art is a practice of pressing and stretching your imagination. If you're in art class and you're working on a project, you have to problem-solve how you're going to get this project done. There's not a set rule of the only way to solve this issue. If I say paint a landscape, any landscape you want, and here's three crayons, a whole classroom of kids are going to come up with a different solution. I feel that art challenges our minds and opens our minds. That can help in any profession that you are. We all have to problem-solve constantly. If you had more practice with that, you would be better at it and people would feel less like they're ever in a dead end because they'll be able to think their way out of an issue.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Bisa Butler. The show is called The World Is Yours on view at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery at 18 Worcester Street through June 30th. I want to describe that the gallery is multilevel.

Bisa Butler: Yes.

Alison Stewart: It's bright and it's white, and your pieces are large, and extremely colorful. How did you think about their placement in that space?

Bisa Butler: That was an illumination for me as well. This is my first solo exhibit with Jeffrey Deitch. I've had other solos, but not at his space. One thing that the galleries thought of, he didn't build a second layer on top. That light you're seeing, there are skylights all through the ceiling. You get this beautiful natural light that you don't often get in a gallery space, especially in New York where space is a premium. He could capitalize on that space and build floors above and then there goes the natural light.

I thought about how the pieces would look in the space when we started talking about the show about a year ago. I had it in my mind of how it might look, but the natural light and having the work hung was just a revelation to me, because that is not how it is in my studio. Mostly the work is down on a table or on the floor. A lot of the pieces were a lot bigger than I thought they would be. You know that piece, the Man with the Afro?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Bisa Butler: You can see him from the door. I had no idea that that piece was that big. Your perception of something as it's horizontal, laying down, is completely different. I would say if that man stood up, he might be like a 10-foot-tall colossus. He just didn't look that big at first. It made me see my year. This show took about a year and a half for me to work on, and I could finally see my year in visual form of what I was doing. It felt really good to see the pieces come to life and stand up.

Alison Stewart: What do you do when you're feeling stuck?

Bisa Butler: When I'm feeling stuck-- New York and online, we have access to now so much art and so much inspiration. It's really important for me to see other people's artwork. I recently went to Lauren Halsey's exhibit on top of the Met. Me and my husband went to the 50th reunion for Wild Style, the hip hop movie. We had met before Lee Quiñones and Charlie Ahearn. It's other people's art and art forms that inspire me and remind me why I love art, and make me want to go home and get busy.

Alison Stewart: For someone who's listening, I know we have a lot of artists who listen in their studios. For someone who is feeling passionate, maybe feeling stuck or wanting to, as an art teacher, and was thinking, gosh, I would really love to be able to be a full-time artist, what advice would you give them? What counsel?

Bisa Butler: My advice is I'm a firm believer in education, so I believe that it's important to get out and look at other people's art. If you can, go to those openings and speak to the artists, speak to the galleries, and start finding out what happens behind the scenes. I always read artist biographies. That's the best thing. Their curriculum vitae, it's literally a map telling you everything that they did. Not everything but all of the places they exhibited and the people who helped them get where they are. Then I try to do that same thing. Even if it's an artist like Jacob Lawrence, some of the institutions that helped him still exist to this day.

I try to seek that out. I think it's very important to learn your craft, if you can learn with someone or take a community class. I even tell people if you can't, there's so much on YouTube now or things that you can practice and do, but you have to keep practicing. You can't get better at something if you're not working at it constantly. All the years that I was teaching from 2003 until now, I always made artwork. Even if nobody was buying it, even if nobody told me it was good. I heard so many nos. I heard people say your work is not traditional African American quilting.

It's not traditional Black American portraiture or European portraiture for that matter. Your work doesn't fit. This is the work that I like to make. Also, don't forget that you have a lot of support in your community. I went to Howard University to study painting. It's when I remembered what my mother and my grandmother taught me, that I was able to become who I was meant to be. I had knew those lessons already before I had ever even went to school. Our parents, our grandparents, our aunts, our uncles, they've already sacrificed for us. It's important to recognize that older people and elderly people have a lot that they can offer us.

I think it's important to be able to connect with other artists and get a real opinion. That's why art school is important because those critiques are wicked, but they're real, or if you have somebody in your life with a really keen eye, like your sister. They say, nobody's going to tell you that, but your mama or your sister. Somebody who's going to tell you the truth, "That does not look good. These are some things that you could fix." It's lovely to have people say, "This is great, I love it," but if they're not telling you the truth, you're going to have trouble improving yourself.

Then the other thing is, keep making and don't be afraid to exhibit your work. That's a tough thing. Because now you're open to public opinion, but that public opinion is important. I know some people who I met exhibiting my artwork on my first exhibit till now, and they are people who said-- like a lovely woman, her name is Nina. I met her, she worked at a famous fabric store in New York. I think it was B&H or B&J. She was like, "I have a bunch of scraps of fabric remnants and I'm going to give them to you." I wouldn't have connected with Nina if I hadn't been exhibiting my work at Essex County College at this little art exhibit.

Alison Stewart: The name of the show is The World Is Yours, on view at the Jeffery Deitch gallery at 18 Wooster Street through June 30th. You should go see it. Bisa Butler has been my guest. Bisa, thank you for coming to the studio, and congratulations.

Bisa Butler: Thank you so much, Alison. I had so much fun, and it's been a real pleasure chatting with you.

 

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