Artwork Details
- Title
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Beats His Wings
- Artist
- Date
- 2012
- Location
- Dimensions
- 49 × 47 1⁄4 in. (124.5 × 120.0 cm)
- Credit Line
- Gift of Fleur S. Bresler
- Mediums Description
- commercial cotton fabric, rayon, linen, chiffon, batik fabric, cotton batting, acrylic paint, and polyester fabric
- Classifications
- Subjects
- Portrait male — Dunbar, Paul Laurence
- Occupation — writer — poet
- African American
- Animal — bird
- Object Number
- 2023.40.5
Artwork Description
Bisa Butler
born 1973, Orange, NJ
resides West Orange, NJ
I Know Why the Caged Bird Beats His Wings
2012
commercial cotton fabric, rayon, linen, chiffon, batik fabric, cotton batting, acrylic paint, and polyester fabric
As a student at Howard University in Washington, DC, Bisa Butler would often walk by Dunbar High School on her way to class. She later learned that the school, named for poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, was the first public high school for African American students in the nation, having opened its doors in 1870 in the ??basement of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. As Butler researched Dunbar’s life in photographs, she admired how his stylish self-presentation mirrored his poetry, which he wrote in a Black vernacular dialect.
This portrait quilt of Dunbar features the poet in front of a caged bird and a bird flying freely, visually connecting Black expressive culture to liberation. A few lines from Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy,” from which Maya Angelou derived the title of her acclaimed memoir, float around the border. Butler realizes Dunbar’s life, his words, his character, in dazzling color, layering hand-dyed batiks using a technique called appliqué.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Fleur S. Bresler, 2023.40.5