Brainard Carey

Bisa Butler was born in Orange, NJ, the daughter of a college president and a French teacher. She was raised in South Orange and the youngest of four siblings.  Butler’s artistic talent was first recognized at the age of four, when she won a blue ribbon in an art competition.

Formally trained , Butler graduated Cum Laude from Howard University with a Bachelor’s in Fine Art degree.  It was during her education at Howard that Butler was able to refine her natural talents under the tutelage of lecturers such as Lois Mailou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, Jeff Donaldson and Ernie Barnes. She began to experiment with fabric as a medium and became interested in collage techniques.

Butler then went on to earn a Masters in Art from Montclair State University in 2005.

While in the process of obtaining her Masters degree Butler took a Fiber Arts class where she had an artistic epiphany and she finally realized how to express her art.   “As a child, I was always watching my mother and grandmother sew, and they taught me. After that class, I made a portrait quilt for my grandmother on her deathbed, and I have been making art quilts  ever since.”

Bisa Butler was a high school art teacher for 10 years in the Newark Public Schools and 3 years at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey.

In February 2021 Bisa was awarded a United States Artist fellowship.Butler’s work is currently the focus of a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, the second stop of a traveling exhibit which began at the Katonah Museum of Art. She is represented by the Claire Oliver Gallery of New York. Butlers work has been acquired by many private and public collections including The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture,The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Nelson-Adkins Museum , 21cMuseum Hotels, The Kemper Museum of Art, The Orlando Museum of Art, The Newark Museum, The Toledo Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Rebecca Bryant creates danceworks that combine movement with text, video, and objects. Originally trained in visual art, Bryant’s dances emphasize improvisational methods and performative states, as well as non-hierarchical collaboration across disciplines.  Bryant has shown her work in 26 US states and in Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Spain, Germany, Romania, Hungary, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. She worked extensively with the Lower Left Performance Collective for 13 years and is a co-founder of PMPD (dance/music/new media). Her projects have received support from residencies such as Djerassi Resident Artist Program (USA) and Guapamacátaro Art and Ecology Residency (Mexico), and a choreographic grant from the Puffin Foundation. Bryant has danced for renowned and emerging choreographers including Nina Martin, Wally Cardona, Victoria Marks, Kim Epifano, Shelley Senter, Lionel Popkin, and Marianne Kim. She has taught workshops in New York, Stockholm, Oslo, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Bogota, and at the Los Angeles Improvisational Dance Festival, West Coast Contact Improv Festival, Texas Dance Improvisation Festival, Contact Festival Freiburg, TransContact Festival, Kontakt Budapest Festival, and at numerous universities across the US.  She holds a BA in Visual Art and an MFA in Dance, and teaches dance improvisation, composition, somatics, and pedagogy at California State University, Long Beach.

The book mentioned in the interview is The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman.

Benjamin Bertocci lives with his small family and has been working out of his studio in Queens, New York since 2005. He was raised in Stockbridge Massachusetts, and attended Bard College at Simon’s Rock, UMASS Amherst, and worked as Visiting Assistant professor of Printmaking at Southern Illinois University.

He primarily shows with VonAmmonco Gallery.