He said he used to pray every night that he lived because he wants to take care of the children. The family was so devastated financially after my grandfather’s death that my father always had in his mind that that was never going to happen to his family. The two different sisters are married to the same man? Two of his sisters were married to, I think, he was a 60-year-old man. She could only keep the baby with her and there were five. His mother, my grandmother, couldn’t afford to take care of the children. Somebody after his father passed, the family split apart. By the time he got home, the family was on their way back from the burial. It took him about … I think he said about 24 hours on the bus. He had heard, they told him your father is ill, you need to go home. He was at boarding school, and he caught a bus home. His father died of appendicitis when he was about 11. He just talked about what that was like and the struggles that he went through as a child. If you’re a street sweeper, you’d be the best street sweeper.” He told us so many stories about being a small boy in Ghana in the 1940s, and what that was like to have to … school kids used to sing All Hail to the Queen, talking about Queen Elizabeth because Ghana wasn’t a free country at the time. What my father would always drum that into our heads, “No matter what you do, you have to be the best. ![]() You’ve said that you got your unwavering work ethic from him. He ultimately became a college president for nearly four decades. Your father left Ghana in 1960 and came to the United States with a scholarship to study and a suitcase with one shirt, and one pair of pants. You are the youngest of four siblings and your mother’s family is from Louisiana? I think the only difference is that I kept at it. I think that goes with most kids, though. Was there ever a time in your history you can think of when you weren’t being creative? You also want a blue ribbon in the Plainfield sidewalk art competition when you were four. I understand you were allowed to draw guardian angels on the walls of your bedroom when you were three, so that you wouldn’t be afraid to sleep in your own bed. When the month changed, somebody else’s name was up there. I thought that meant art like the artists of the school, artists Emeritus forever. The name of the nursery school was Sundance School, just to give you an idea of what we got going. I’m so happy to be here.īisa is it true you were named as the artist of the month at your nursery school? She joins me to talk about her work and her career. But Bisa Butler has brought them back to us in life scale images that stick in the mind and claim our attention and respect. But most are unnamed men and women who happened to have had a photograph taken before they were forgotten by history. Bisa Butler does extraordinarily vibrant quilted portraits of African-Americans. But it’s saying that Jackson Pollock worked in paint. I could say Bisa Butler is a fiber artist and I wouldn’t be wrong. Here’s Debbie, first with a couple of messages about her interview with Bisa Butler. ![]() ![]() I think I could see and I could feel it, too. On this episode, Bisa Butler talks about her career and about how making a quilted portrait of her grandmother led to an artistic breakthrough. For 16 years, Debbie has been talking with creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. This is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. I understood that of her before she passed that that’s how she saw herself and that’s how she wanted to be seen. It’s perfectly fine to have a picture of her at 20, or 30, or 40. You know when people die and the pictures at the funeral are sometimes younger. Fiber artist Bisa Butler discusses the AfriCOBRA tradition, the artistic breakthrough that led to her finding her voice, and the process behind her amazing life-size works.
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