FABRIC, LEGACY, AND LIGHT | BISA BUTLER IN CONVERSATION AT SOHO HOUSE CHICAGO

Danny Dunson, DuSable Black History Museum & Education Center, in conversation with Bisa Butler at Soho House

On a recent evening at Soho House Chicago, curator Erica S. Hubbard created something rare — an intimate space for Chicagoans to sit with one of contemporary art's most powerful voices. Textile artist Bisa Butler joined curator Danny Dunson for a conversation that felt less like a formal program and more like an exchange between old friends, candid, unscripted, and alive.

Dunson, whose curatorial vision has long centered Black artistic legacy, drew Butler out with the ease of someone who deeply understands her work. The two explored how Butler's quilts do far more than depict — they reveal. Each piece asks: Who is this person? Where do they come from? What is their legacy?

Butler's answer lives in the fabric itself. The daughter of a Ghanaian father and a New Orleans mother, she selects textiles the way a novelist selects words — with intention and ancestry woven in. Her first quilt was a portrait of her grandfather, a man she never met. That search for connection across time remains central to everything she creates.

Dunson noted how Butler has elevated "women's work" — the domestic art of quilting — into monumental cultural reclamation, reactivating the photograph and honoring the unseen.

Currently, Butler is deep in a project marking the 50th anniversary of the Gordon Parks Foundation, set to open in 2027. The room — filled with artists and art lovers — felt the full weight of that mission.