Ambreen Butt

Last updated
Ambreen Butt
Born1969
Lahore, Pakistan
NationalityPakistani-American
EducationNational College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan (BFA, 1993) Massachusetts College of Art (MFA, 1997) [1]
Known forDrawings, miniature paintings, prints, and collage
AwardsMaud Morgan Prize (2006) James and Audrey Foster Prize (1999) [2]
Website http://www.ambreenbutt.com

Ambreen Butt (born 1969) is a Boston-based Pakistani American artist best known for her drawings, paintings, prints, and collages, and has been recognized for her labor intensive, painted self-portraits that portray feminist and political ideas through traditional Persian art. [3] She now resides in Dallas, TX.

Contents

Education

Butt obtained her Bachelor’s of Fine Art in traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting from the National College of Arts in Lahore. She later moved to Boston in 1993 and in 1997 she received her Master’s of Fine Arts in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art [4] (now Massachusetts College of Art and Design).

Art

Butt's work is rooted in her bi-cultural identity and retains the intricate, decorative patterning that characterizes Indian and Persian miniature painting. [5] One such work, I Am My Lost Diamond (2011), created for her Realms of Intimacy exhibition at the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, combined more than 20,000 sculpted fingers and toes cast in resin to create an image of fireworks or flower blossoms when viewed at a distance. [6] The work was influenced by a friend's experience narrowly escaping from a suicide bombing in Butt's hometown of Lahore. [3] She has updated the medium's painstaking technique with new materials, such as PET film, thread and collage.

Ambreen Butt's work, her miniature paintings, more specifically, are made to exemplify social issues. In particular, Butt's work addresses gender roles, cultural differences, the notion of freedom, and the meaning of human rights. This is achieved by blending imagery from newspapers and historical depictions on her canvases. [7] One such social issue, as mentioned, is the differences between the depiction of males and females. In an interview, Butt explains this observation; “I was particularly struck by the representation of women in miniature art. They were often depicted as small seductive creatures. [Conversely,] The male icons [...] had a more god-like representation." [8] “I was more concerned with the woman herself, rather than her body.”

Butt has also employed printmaking techniques in her work. Her 2008 series Dirty Pretty combines the techniques of etching, silkscreen, and lithography, while earlier untitled series combine etching and aquatint. [9]

More recently, Butt's work has been featured on the exterior of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. The enlarged piece is a celebration of the heroism of Mukhtar Mai, a woman gang-raped at the order of her local council in an act of honor revenge. [10] The U.S. State Department also commissioned a large-scale piece that now hangs in the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. [11]

Awards

In 1999, Butt received the inaugural James and Audrey Foster Prize from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. [2] That same year, Butt was artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where she was the first artist in the program to open her studio to the public and engage directly with visitors. [2] She was a 2002 Artist-in-Residence at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation in Charlotte, NC. She has also been the recipient of the Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation, Maud Morgan Prize from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. In 2009, she received an Artadia Award. [12]

Selected exhibition history

Solo exhibitions

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum</span> Art museum in Boston, Massachusetts

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts, which houses significant examples of European, Asian, and American art. Its collection includes paintings, sculpture, tapestries, and decorative arts. It was founded by Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose will called for her art collection to be permanently exhibited "for the education and enjoyment of the public forever."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lilla Cabot Perry</span> American painter

Lilla Cabot Perry was an American artist who worked in the American Impressionist style, rendering portraits and landscapes in the free form manner of her mentor, Claude Monet. Perry was an early advocate of the French Impressionist style and contributed to its reception in the United States. Perry's early work was shaped by her exposure to the Boston School of artists and her travels in Europe and Japan. She was also greatly influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophies and her friendship with Camille Pissarro. Although it was not until the age of thirty-six that Perry received formal training, her work with artists of the Impressionist, Realist, Symbolist, and German Social Realist movements greatly affected the style of her oeuvre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isabella Stewart Gardner</span> American patron of the arts (1840–1924)

Isabella Stewart Gardner was an American art collector, philanthropist, and patron of the arts. She founded the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Jane Gardner</span> American painter

Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau was an American academic and salon painter, who was born in Exeter, New Hampshire. She was an American expatriate who died in Paris where she had lived most of her life. She studied in Paris under the figurative painter Hugues Merle (1823–1881), the well-known salon painter Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836–1911), and finally under William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). After Bouguereau's wife died, Gardner became his paramour and after the death of his mother, who bitterly opposed the union, she married him in 1896. She adopted his subjects, compositions, and even his smooth facture, channeling his style so successfully that some of her work might be mistaken for his. In fact, she was quoted as saying, "I know I am censured for not more boldly asserting my individuality, but I would rather be known as the best imitator of Bouguereau than be nobody!"

Anne Hawley was the Norma Jean Calderwood Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston from 1989 until 2015. Founded in 1903 and one of Boston's most important cultural institutions, the museum is a highly unique installation of Gardner’s private collection, considered to be a work of art in totality. Hawley stepped down from the position at the end of 2015 with plans to continue working with artists and the artistic community. She has been named a Resident Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics, beginning in spring 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anna Claypoole Peale</span> American painter

Anna Claypoole Peale was an American painter who specialized in portrait miniatures on ivory and still lifes. She and her sister, Sarah Miriam Peale, were the first women elected academicians of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) is a privately owned museum whose stated aim is "to celebrate the labor of artists whose work would be displayed and appreciated in no other forum". It was originally in Dedham, Massachusetts, and is currently in Boston, Massachusetts. Its permanent collection includes over 700 pieces of "art too bad to be ignored", 25 to 35 of which are on public display at any one time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Edwards (artist)</span>

Thomas Edwards (1795–1869) was an artist in 19th-century Boston, Massachusetts, specializing in portraits. Born in London and trained at the Royal Academy, he worked in Boston in the 1820s-1850s, and in Worcester in the 1860s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eleanor Norcross</span> American painter (1854–1923)

Ella Augusta "Eleanor" Norcross was an American painter who studied under William Merritt Chase and Alfred Stevens. She lived the majority of her adult life in Paris, France, as an artist and collector and spent the summers in her hometown of Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Norcross painted Impressionist portraits and still lifes, and is better known for her paintings of genteel interiors.

Laura Owens is an American painter, gallery owner and educator. She emerged in the late 1990s from the Los Angeles art scene. She is known for large-scale paintings that combine a variety of art historical references and painterly techniques. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen M. Knowlton</span> American painter

Helen Mary Knowlton was an American artist, art instructor and author. She taught in Boston from 1871 until the mid-1910s, when she was in her 70s. Her instructor and later employer, William Morris Hunt, was the subject of a portrait she made and several books; she is considered his principal biographer.

Rachel Perry is an American artist. She is known for conceptual works using drawing, photography, video, collage, sculpture and performance, which address “the fleeting nature of experience, the elusiveness of desire, and the persistence of objects in a throwaway culture.” Art critic Jerry Saltz has written that her work "not only grappl[es] with consumerism but [she is] just about swallowed whole by it.” Her work also considers themes of gender identity, narcissism, privacy and information overload.

Ruth Laskey is an American artist known for her Minimalist weavings and grid paintings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Coombs Hills</span> American artist and illustrator

Laura Coombs Hills (1859–1952) was an American artist and illustrator who specialized in watercolor and pastel still life paintings, especially of flowers, and miniature portrait paintings on ivory. She became the first miniature painter elected to the Society of American Artists, and was a founder of the American Society of Miniature Painters. She also worked as a designer and illustrated children's books for authors such as Kate Douglas Wiggin and Anna M. Pratt.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clarissa Peters Russell</span> American painter


Clarissa Peters Russell was an American miniaturist. Her name is often given as Mrs. Moses B. Russell.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tomashi Jackson</span> American artist

Tomashi Jackson is an American multimedia artist working across painting, video, textiles and sculpture. Jackson was born in Houston, Texas, raised in Los Angeles, and currently lives and works in New York, NY and Cambridge, MA. Jackson was named a 2019 Whitney Biennial participating artist. Jackson also serves on the faculty for sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design. Her work is included in the collection of MOCA Los Angeles. In 2004, a 20-foot-high by 80-foot-long mural by Jackson entitled Evolution of a Community was unveiled in the Los Angeles neighborhood of West Adams.

Jessica Snow is an American abstract artist, filmmaker, curator, and professor. Distinguishing characteristics of Snow’s paintings and drawings include bright, vivid colors through a visual language that employs color, shape and texture Snow's sources of artistic inspiration include landscape design, ancient art history, and the natural world. Her presentation of these subjects is influenced by traditions of geometric abstraction, biomorphism, and color field painting. She lives and works in San Francisco, California, where she teaches painting, drawing and art appreciation at the University of San Francisco.

Claire Beckett is an American photographer known for her exploration of post-9/11 America.

Jackie Saccoccio was an American abstract painter. Her works, considered examples of gestural abstraction, featured bright color, large canvases, and deliberately introduced randomness.

Kerri Scharlin is an American painter and conceptual artist who lives and works in New York City. She is known for a series of conceptual projects made in the 1990s that explored identity through the outsourcing of self portraiture to observers such as police sketch artists, art students, and magazine profilers. The New York Times said her works are “proof that identity is not fixed, that one’s persona and possibly even one’s self are malleable and fluid, capable of continual adjustment.”

References

  1. ↑ "Biography: Ambreen Butt". Artist Pension Trust. Retrieved March 20, 2014.
  2. 1 2 3 "Ambreen Butt:Residency". Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Archived from the original on March 20, 2014. Retrieved March 14, 2014.
  3. 1 2 "Ambreen Butt". Art in America. Retrieved 2019-03-03.
  4. ↑ Massachusetts College of Art Commencement Program, 1997.
  5. ↑ Miller, Francine Koslow. "Ambreen Butt at Carroll and Sons". Art in America. Retrieved March 14, 2014.
  6. ↑ "I Am My Lost Diamond". MassArt. 2019-01-10. Retrieved 2019-03-03.
  7. ↑ Ludwig, Justine (2013). Realms of Intimacy: Miniaturist Practice From Pakistan. Library of Congress. ISBN   9781880593110.
  8. ↑ "A portrait of the artist, Ambreen Butt". The Express Tribune. 24 Feb 2013. Retrieved 20 March 2015.
  9. ↑ "Ambreen Butt". Carroll and Sons Art Gallery. Archived from the original on 2014-03-20. Retrieved March 20, 2014.
  10. ↑ "Pakistani Artist, Known For Miniature Paintings, Goes Big With Female Warrior At The Gardner". www.wbur.org. Retrieved 2019-03-03.
  11. ↑ "Ambreen Butt – U.S. Department of State" . Retrieved 2019-03-03.
  12. ↑ "Ambreen Butt". Artadia. Retrieved 2019-06-11.
  13. ↑ Butt, Ambreen, 2003, I Must Utter What Comes to My Lips, exhibition catalogue, 1 March- 11 May, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.
  14. ↑ Butt, Ambreen, I Need A Hero, exhibition card, 23 June - 29 July 2005, Kustera Tilton Gallery, New York.
  15. ↑ Butt, Ambreen, Mark My Words, exhibition pamphlet, 7 December 2018- 14 April 2019, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.