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@iduhouse.bsky.socialSep 30, 2026, 5:08 AM

🧵 Artist of the Day: Bisa Butler

Through fabric and color, Bisa Butler redefines portraiture. Her quilts turn texture into story, weaving threads of identity, memory, and resilience into vivid, larger-than-life portraits of the African diaspora.

#CreatorsAtWork #BlackSky #Skystorians #Art

Bisa Butler sits at a worktable in her Jersey City studio, sunlight falling across her face, hands, and a spread of patterned fabric. She holds blue-handled scissors and a narrow textile strip; purple and teal scissors, pins, tools, and cut cloth surround her, while two longarm quilting machines rise behind her. Photographed by Nina Choi for Luxe Interiors + Design in 2024, the image catches Butler in the labor that turns photographs into quilted portraits. She trained as a painter at Howard University, where teachers connected to AfriCOBRA encouraged Black artists to build their own color language outside European traditions. But paint eventually stopped fitting her life. Pregnancy made its smell unbearable, and later, as a young mother, she needed a medium she could practice safely around her children. In graduate school at Montclair State, a fiber-arts class unlocked the answer: fabric could carry drawing, painting, memory, and touch at once. Her mother and grandmother had already taught her to sew. Butler now enlarges source photographs, maps their light and shadow with marker, cuts fabric into shapes, layers them like a painter building glazes, and quilts the top, batting, and backing together. Her materials are never neutral. African wax prints, silk, velvet, lace, family scraps, and fabrics named for proverbs can signal ancestry, emotion, protection, grief, or power. For years she made this work at home, often after teaching high school all day; her Jersey City studio became her first professional workspace. That makes this photo more than a process shot. It shows an artist whose practice grew from domestic knowledge into museum-scale history painting without abandoning the intimacy of sewing. In 2026, Butler is preparing for Tender Monuments at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, her largest survey yet, spanning a 1995 self-portrait to a new 2026 one. The scissors on this table sit inside a thirty-year story still being cut, layered, and stitched into formBisa Butler stands before her quilt Dahomey Amazon, photographed by her husband, John Butler. She wears an off-the-shoulder dress in pink, yellow, blue, and brown African-print fabric, one hand on her hip, long locs over one shoulder. Behind her, the quilted woman meets the viewer head-on: her face is built from purples, cobalt blue, turquoise, and green; gold hoop earrings frame her face; cowrie-shell necklaces and patterned cloth create a commanding presence against a red-and-white geometric field. The photograph became widely used to represent Butler as her work moved from teaching into major museum recognition. Dahomey Amazon, dated 2019 by several museum sources, draws its title from the women warriors of the Kingdom of Dahomey in present-day Benin, remembered today as the Agojie. Butler constructs authority through textiles, scale, color, and gaze. That method comes from several lineages at once. Her Ghanaian father connected her to African history; her Louisiana-born mother and grandmother taught her sewing; and at Howard University she studied in an environment shaped by AfriCOBRA, whose artists championed “Kool-Aid colors,” Black pride, and visual languages made for Black communities. Butler carries those lessons into quilting, choosing fabrics because patterns can hold cultural memory and emotional meaning. She has said her portraits form a family album stretching across the Black diaspora, from America to Africa and the Caribbean. Standing beside Dahomey Amazon, Butler almost mirrors her subject: both women face us in patterned cloth, refusing the distance museums have placed between “fine art,” textile traditions, and Black women’s labor. Today, that refusal is part of the American art story. Butler’s quilts sit in major American museum collections, and her 2027 Smithsonian survey, Tender Monuments, will place nearly forty works beside artistic ancestors including Faith Ringgold and Betye Saar, making visible the lineage she has been stitching all alongBisa Butler’s Forever, 2020, is a near life-size quilted portrait of Chadwick Boseman. He stands before black mountains, green palms, and an orange patterned sky, a bright green arch curving over his head like a rainbow or halo. His face is rendered in blue, purple, red, green, and turquoise fabrics; his beard and hair are built from dark and neon-green textures. He wears layers of patterned cloth, including a red-and-black cape over richly colored tailoring, and looks at the viewer with a quiet expression. Butler made Forever after Boseman died in August 2020 at 43. Both artists were Howard University alumni: Butler earned her BFA there in 1995, while Boseman graduated in 2000 before portraying Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and T’Challa. Butler said the quilt began “out of love and admiration,” describing Boseman as an activist and advocate for honor, dignity, truth, and integrity. Every material choice carries part of that mourning. She explained that in her Ghanaian culture, red and black are worn at funerals when someone dies young, symbolizing the anguish of an early loss. Neon-green lace forms the coils of his hair; velvet speaks to softness and class; the lush landscape imagines him in paradise. Butler deliberately made the figure almost life-size so that he would feel present among us rather than reduced to an image of someone gone. The work entered the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and appeared in Black American Portraits, an exhibition that placed contemporary Black portraiture in conversation with two centuries of representation. That context matters: Butler’s larger project has always been to return fullness, dignity, and interior life to Black subjects, whether famous or anonymous. Forever does that through grief. It refuses to let Boseman become only a symbol, superhero, or headline. In Butler’s hands, cloth becomes memorial, color becomes emotion, and quilting becomes a way to hold a person close after history has taken him awayBisa Butler stands in her studio beside two towering quilts, photographed by Celeste Sloman for Smithsonian in 2023. Butler wears a black suit covered in gold stars, a cap, pink hair, and white sneakers; she reaches toward the central figure as if presenting him. That work, Young, Gifted and Black, shows a young Black man in a beret and patchwork suit against a blue patterned field. At left is As Long as Heaven and Earth Exist, the Rules of Fashion Will Never End, whose figure wears a leopard-patterned hat and scarf. The titles show how Butler builds beyond likeness. “Young, Gifted and Black” carries a Black cultural lineage through Lorraine Hansberry, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin, framing the sitter through possibility rather than absence. The neighboring title borrows the first line associated with the prayer of Les Sapeurs, the Congolese culture of elegant dressing in which clothing becomes discipline, performance, self-definition, and dignity. Butler often begins with photographs whose subjects were not fully identified by archives. She studies posture, clothing, history, and expression, then chooses fabrics that let her imagine the person’s interior world. She has described her process almost like cultural anthropology: trying to recover the human being behind the picture. Her fabrics may carry names, proverbs, ancestral references, fashion histories, or emotional codes; vivid skin colors shift attention away from literal complexion and toward spirit. The image catches Butler doing what her work asks museums to do: look longer, name people with care, and treat Black style as evidence rather than decoration. Three years later, that method is entering another chapter. In 2026 she completed a new self-portrait, and in 2027 the Smithsonian American Art Museum will open Tender Monuments, the largest survey of her career, framing these quilts not as soft alternatives to monuments, but as monuments themselves: stitched, intimate, and built to keep memory alive
@kefauver4prez.bsky.socialSep 30, 2026, 1:36 AM

A pair of East Tennessee boys made good!

Kefauver and Hollywood actor James Dobson (no relation to the evangelical leader) happened to pay a visit to the offices of the Knoxville News-Sentinel at the same time in October 1958.

#skystorians #history #polisky

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@footnotesinhistory.bsky.socialSep 30, 2026, 12:27 AM

#OTD in 1944, nine more Japanese American men who resisted the draft were sentenced to prison by Judge Chase Clark. The men, former residents of Western Washington who were sent to Minidoka, were all fined and sentenced to three years and three months in jail.
🗃 #skystorians

"Jap Draft Dodgers Sentenced to Prison" BOISE, Sent. 29.(AP)-Nine Japanese-Americans from the relocation center at Hunt, Idaho, convicted of violating the Selective Service Act, today were sentenced to prison by Federal Judge Chase A. Clark Sentenced to three years and three months each and fined $300 were: Shozo Kiyomizu. 28 years old, Seattle; Yukio Kawato,, 23, Seattle; George Shigaki Kashara, 19, Hunt; Yutaka Frank Maruhashi, 21, Seattle: George Nakagawa 18. Hunt: Isao Nakashima, 21 Seattle: Nubuo Omoto. 23. Seattle: Frank Tashiro, 22, Seattle; Hedio Frank Yamasaki, 18, Puyallup, Wash. The Seattle Times, September 29, 1944
@thesowhat.bsky.socialSep 30, 2026, 12:04 AM

New issue, who dis?! Issue 6 is up and ready for your eyeballs!
#medievalsky #skystorians #arthuriansky #pubhums
Let the piece previews commence! /1

@footnotesinhistory.bsky.socialSep 29, 2026, 11:56 PM

#OTD in 1944, Gordon Hirabayashi returns to court again for resisting the draft. This time, Hirabayashi refused to report to a pre-induction exam for military service. Hirabayashi was arrested less than three months earlier for not returning a Selective Service questionnaire.
🗃 #skystorians

"Hirabayashi Again In Federal Court" SPOKANE. Sept. 29. (AP)- Gordon K. Hirabayashi, American-born Japanese, who gained nationwide attention in an unsuccessful court fight against evacuation from the Pacific Coast area, was in court again today. Arraigned before United States Commissioner Raymond F. Kelly on a charge of failing to report for pre-induction examination for militarv service. Hirabavashi was bound over to Federal Court and held in lieu of $2,500 bond. On Julv 3 Hirabavashi was arrested here on a charge of failing to return a Selective Service questionnaire. The case, based on a Seattle federal indictment, is pending. Hirabavashi was married July 29 to Miss Esther Schmoe of Seattle
@liamtemple.bsky.socialSep 29, 2026, 7:52 PM

Thanks to everyone that came to Notre Dame London for my book launch, and especially to fellow @ccshistorycatholic.bsky.social scholar Dr James E. Kelly for interviewing me about the book! It was great to see so many familiar faces in the room, including many Capuchins! #capuchins #skystorians

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@lindaaburnett.bsky.socialSep 29, 2026, 7:42 PM

Please email [email protected] to register and for zoom link. Welcome! #skystorians #histsci #colonialism #naturalhistory #museums #collecting #envhist

@lindaaburnett.bsky.socialSep 29, 2026, 7:37 PM

Please email [email protected] to register and for Zoom link. Welcome! #skystorians #histsci #colonialism #naturalhistory #museums #collecting #envhist
2/2

@georgianlords.bsky.socialSep 29, 2026, 2:17 PM

Few things say the 18th century better than Albemarle Bertie (pronounced Barty) RN, commander of the Crocodile...
#skystorians

painting of an 18th-century warship with one row of port holes, flying flags at either end, on the stocks while under construction. Another three masted ship is in the foreground to the left.
@ideasroadshow.bsky.socialSep 29, 2026, 12:51 PM

☸️ Luckily Catherine was spared the torment of being tortured between 4 spiky wheels when they were magically destroyed by jet-propelled angels. 🚀 👼 Read more about the fresco series on St. Catherine by Spinello 👇 ideasroadshow.substack.com/p/three-hidd...

🗃️ #arthistory #medievalsky #skystorians

⚙️ Emperor Maxentius had ordered that Catherine be tortured to death between four wheels of iron equipped with razor-sharp teeth turning against each other. Luckily Catherine was spared that torment when the wheels were magically destroyed by jet-propelled angels. 👼 Finally, however, Maxentius decrees that she be beheaded - a fate that somehow seemed impossible for her divine supporters to prevent and she was duly martyred.
@livunipress.bsky.socialSep 29, 2026, 10:30 AM

Most read | Historical Studies in Industrial Relations
🔴 Gender Equality and Employment Regulation in the New Labour Years, 1997–2010: The Problem of the Gender Pay Gap by Susan Milner
Read here ⬇️
bit.ly/4d98FeZ

#labourhistory #skystorians #politics

Promotes publishing historical work in industrial relations—Liverpool University Press logo over dark machine gears, large headline text on a red band, and a cream journal cover titled "Historical Studies in Industrial Relations" at right.
@mobhistory.substack.comSep 29, 2026, 10:15 AM

#OTD (Sep 29)
Events in U.S. organized crime #history.

#NewOrleans #California #Wisconsin #DearbornMI #Detroit #Brooklyn #YoungstownOH #NewYork #Mafia #MafiaHistory 🗃️ #Skystorians

On this date, Sept 29... • in 1878, Salvatore Marino, leader of a rebel Mafia group in New Orleans, dies of Yellow Fever. • in 1902, a New York battle involving Eastman and Five Points gangs ends with fifteen arrests. • in 1905, future California mobster Frank Bompensiero is born in Wisconsin. • in 1929, a charge of attempted extortion against Joseph Valachi is dismissed in magistrate's court. • in 1930, Joe Marino of Dearborn MI dies of gunshot wounds suffered when he resisted arrest. • in 1949, noted criminal defense attorney Caesar B.F. Barra passes away at his Brooklyn home at the age of 69. • in 1951, a U.S. federal narcotics case against Nicola Gentile is closed while Gentile is in Sicily. • in 1958, reporters prove that Sandy Naples of Youngstown OH, serving a six-month term for lottery racketeering, is being let out of jail on the weekends. • in 1966, Bonanno Crime Family members Pasquale Gigante, Nicholas Marangello, Michael Consolo and Anthony Lisi begin 30-day sentences for contempt. • in 1986, informer Joseph Cantalupo testifies that Carmine Persico is reigning boss of the Colombo Crime Family. • in 2008, Anthony Spero, once part of Bonanno leadership, dies while serving a life sentence in federal prison. Image of Carmine Persico.
@royalhistsoc.orgSep 29, 2026, 9:19 AM

For more on the RHS Prizes 2027, including eligibility and the four winning authors from 2026, please see:

> First Book Prize: bit.ly/4y1PWd2
> Early Career Article Prize bit.ly/47nTXgJ

#Skystorians 2/2

Image of the web page for the RHS Early Career Article Prize.
@royalhistsoc.orgSep 29, 2026, 9:19 AM

Submissions are now invited for the Society's 2027 First Book and Early Career Article Prizes - covering monographs and articles published in 2026 bit.ly/4z45bD8

The closing date for submissions is 14 December 2026. Judging begins in early 2027 with winners announced next July #Skystorians 1/2

@ideasroadshow.bsky.socialSep 29, 2026, 8:03 AM

👀 An eye-opener this Sumerian head with lapis lazuli eyes & eyebrow, 2600–2500 BC.

Have you subscribed (it's free) to Exploring Art History yet for more surprising artworks, essays & films? Sign up here: ideasroadshow.substack.com

🗃️ #arthistory #skystorians 🏺 #medievalsky #archaeology

A Sumerian head with very large lapis lazuli eyes and eyebrow, 2600–2500 BC.
@bsecs.bsky.socialSep 29, 2026, 7:54 AM

Submissions are welcome for the London Topographical Society's Anne Saunders Prize: £1,000 for an original & unpublished research essay on the topography, development, or buildings of #London in any period.
Details here: londontopsoc.org/about-us/ann...
#skystorians 🗃️

@fancyhistorian.bsky.socialSep 29, 2026, 6:49 AM

Help! Does anyone, by chance, have either photos or transcriptions of Thomas Parsons's diary? In whole or part? He was a stonecutter in Bath in 1769. It's at the Huntington and all I can find a handful of articles :/
#18thc #skystorians