Meet the Maker: Ambreen Butt. Hall Arts Hotel, Dallas, TX. Jan 22nd, 2025.
‘Meet the Maker series’ presents Artist Ambreen Butt. The conversation between the artist, Publisher, and Editor in Chief of Patron Magazine, Terri Provencal, will take place at Hall Arts Hotel. Open to the public; registration required.
‘Border Crossings: Contemporary Art from the Zirinsky Collection’
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH. Jan 10 – June 1, 2025
“Untitled, from the series I Need a Hero” is currently on display in the Ellen Johnson gallery. Butt, born in Pakistan, is a multimedia artist whose work draws on the intricacy and detail of Indian and Pakistani miniature paintings. Working with a range of techniques and mediums including print, thread, and collage, Butt’s work often addresses political tensions relating to women’s and human rights. “Untitled” shows a woman dressed in contemporary Western attire fighting serpents and demons, representing various hardships faced by women around the world. She wields a sword confidently, seemingly unphased by her opponents. Butt creates a complex and layered image by both painting and sewing onto the canvas. This piece, like many of hers, seeks to subvert the typical portrayal of women in miniature paintings, who she has said are often “small seductive creatures.” “Untitled” will be on display in “Border Crossings: Contemporary Art from the Zirinsky Collection” for the rest of the semester.
In Conversation With Ambreen Butt
For nationally renowned Pakistani-American artist Ambreen Butt, the complexities of a broken world are not to be forgotten — they are to be examined in an evocative way that encourages thoughtful reflection. This notion is expressed in all of her work, which fuses the classical techniques of musawwiri (miniature painting) with contemporary Western art forms.
Eve & Max’s newest collection, Namaloom (meaning “unknown” in Urdu), features a print of black text with paint markings, and 24-karat gold leaf on tea-stained paper from Ambreen’s 2017-2020 Say My Name series. It explores striking contrasts between despair and hope, darkness and splendor. As Eve & Max debuts Namaloom with a permanent residency at the Grange Hall boutique in Dallas, we chat with Ambreen about the deeper undertones of her paintings, how she views the world and why she loves the detailed processes her work requires.
New Acquisition: Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.
Gallery Wendi Norris is thrilled to announce that The Asian Art Museum added “Arsenal of Ambiguity” from the series Lay Bare My Arms (2023) by Ambreen Butt to its collection, an acquisition made possible by the George Hopper Fitch Bequest. The artwork is a response to the pervasive gun violence in the United States and her coming to terms with it as a mother. The central demon figure holds a gun in one hand and irises, representing both fragility and protection, in the other – a balancing act between aggression and vulnerability.
Multiple Voices: Ambreen Butt, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Chitra Ganesh, Julio César Morales, Ranu Mukherjee, and Eva Schlegel.
Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco. May 16 – July 13, 2024.
Gallery Wendi Norris presents Multiple Voices, a group exhibition exploring the idea of multiplicity, material, and metaphorical. Bringing together gallery artists Ambreen Butt, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Chitra Ganesh, Julio César Morales, Ranu Mukherjee, and Eva Schlegel, the exhibition features artworks that are multiples, with the state of multiplicity embedded into their very fabrication. On a conceptual level, each of the artists exhibited plays with the relationship between the multiple and the multitudes in their artwork, seeking to amplify voices beyond their own. The prints, sculpture, video, and performance photography exhibited work together like a Greek chorus, uniting as a collective voice to speak truth and bear witness. Multiple Voices addresses the vital need for diverse points of view and redresses the implications of silencing. The polyphony of voices that ring out from the artworks speak to the viewer: we will be heard, we will be seen.
“Multiple Voices” is on view at the Gallery Wendi Norris San Francisco Headquarters through June 29, 2024.
Art Talks: Featuring Ambren Butt. Lesley University, Cambridge, MA. January 8th, 2024.
Excited to announce that Artist Ambreen Butt will be one of the speakers at Lesley MFA Art Talks for January ‘24 residency! The thematic is “In Transition”. Other speakers include Sonia Almeida, Vivian Li, Eva Lundsager, and Christopher James. All talks will be live-streamed for the public at LesleyMFA.org
In Focus: Artists at Work” National Museum of Women in the Arts. April 21, 2023 – April 20, 2025
For the first time ever, NMWA has produced a series of short films spotlighting collection artists. For this project, NMWA worked with the award-winning film production company Smartypants Pictures to create the series, each video profiling one contemporary artist in the museum’s collection. These short vignettes (around three minutes each), highlight the practice of each artist and reveal how initiatives for equity, those pursued by the artists themselves as well as institutional programs like NMWA’s, shape their careers and daily lives.
The eight artists profiled in the series are: Ambreen Butt, Sonya Clark, Colette Fu, Guerrilla Girls, Graciela Iturbide, Delita Martin, Rania Matar, and Alison Saar. Presented in two phases, with four artists highlighted in each phase, this series spotlights groundbreaking women artists at work today.
To ensure an immersive in-gallery experience, NMWA worked with the experiential design firm Art Processors to create an intimate viewing experience for the films. Graphic wall panels include QR codes to access online resources as well as locations to the artists’ artwork in the museum’s collection galleries. With this series, NMWA continues its commitment to artists working today and sharing their stories with visitors both in person and online.
Exhibition Announcement.
Ambreen Butt: ‘Lay Bare My Arms’ at Gallery Wendi Norris. San Francisco, California. November 9 – December 22, 2023.
Gallery Wendi Norris is delighted to present Lay Bare My Arms, Ambreen Butt’s first in-person solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring eight new meticulously painted and collaged works, this exhibition coincides with the release of Butt’s first monograph, What Comes to My Lips.
Lay Bare My Arms foregrounds Butt’s perspective as a woman and a mother, processing the consequences of political stagnation and gun violence in America. Combining the radiant aesthetics of South Asian miniature paintings with the democratic nature of collage, Butt adorns her paintings with textual fragments from the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, an artistic interpretation that questions how the law is changed within and by society.
A central work in this exhibition, Guardians of Safe Heavens, features two figures that resemble demons. One holds a pistol, symbolizing the ever-present threat of violence that can disrupt the sanctity of life. The other cradles a walking iris, whose ephemeral bloom lasts only one day, emphasizing the fragility of existence. Though these creatures suggest potential danger, they are also engagingly rendered, inviting viewers to contemplate the delicate balance between safety and risk in today’s time. This work, along with the other seven pieces of Lay Bare My Arms, asks the fundamental question, where are the safe spaces for the most vulnerable?
Rather than inciting a political call to action, Butt positions herself as a witness and record-keeper. Lay Bare My Arms, like her previous Say My Name series, prompts viewers to consider the realities of those afflicted by violence, going beyond the role of a news consumer with the privilege of distance from lived violence.
Ambreen Butt in Conversation with San Jose’ Museum Curatorial Associate Nidhi Gandhi. November 6th, 2023, at the Battery, San Francisco.
Join us in the Library for a conversation between the artist Ambreen Butt and Nidhi Gandhi, a curatorial associate of the San Jose Museum of Art, on the occasion of Butt’s first solo Exhibition, ‘Lay Bare My Arms’ in San Francisco at Gallery Wendi Norris, and the release of her first monograph ‘What Comes to My Lips’ on Nov 6th at the Battery, San Francisco. To register for the event, please visit Gallery Wendi Norris .
New Acquisition: Chapman University
The Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University acquires Sultanat Khan (16) (2020). As a part of her Say My Name series, Butt explores the relationship between power and vulnerability and pays homage to innocent life lost in “Sultanat Khan (16”).
This is My Story: A Storytelling Event, directed by Julia Estelle Cotton.
Amphibian Stage, Fort Worth, Texas. Sparkfest 2023
Join us at the Amphibian Theater in Fort Worth for an exciting storytelling event directed by Julia Estelle Cotton, with stories by Hamid Adibi, Soccer Referee; Ambreen Butt, Visual Artist; Hady Mawajdeh, Producer; Laleh Rezaie, Barber; Morvarid Rezaie, Physician. The show will conclude with a talkback session with additional discussion.
‘Printing protest’ Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. April 19-August 27, 2023.
Printing Protest explores printmaking as a means for the artistic expression of social and political protest from the sixteenth century through the present. Conversations between prints from different historical, geographical, and cultural contexts investigate continuities and evolutions in the use of prints as a tool for social criticism. Stanford students selected the included prints from the Cantor Arts Center collection.
This exhibition is organized by students in the seminar Printing Protest: The Artist as Social Critic, instructed by Natalia Lauricella, PhD, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Lynn Krywick Gibbons Gallery Exhibitions Fund at the Cantor Arts Center.
Book Announcement
Ambreen Butt: What Comes To My Lips
What Comes To My Lips is the first Monograph on the artist Ambreen Butt. Trained in the thousand-year tradition of Indo-Persian miniature painting and contemporary Western art and theory, Butt’s studio practice circumvents history, tradition and contemporaneity creating a multifaceted project that explores civil liberties and rights, mutual responsibilities and complex geopolitical forces.
Illuminated with images of the artist’s paintings, collaged works on paper and large-scale installations from the past three decades, this in-depth book features essays by curator/writer Sara Raza and artist/critic Quddus Mirza.
An intimate archive of Butt’s technically rich, aesthetically delightful work, “What Comes to My Lips” invites the reader to enter the symbolic landscape of Butt’s oeuvre and discover the hidden, unseen and unrecorded aspects that shimmer beneath the surface of even the most fraught realities.
Exhibition: ‘Say the dream was real and the wall imaginary’
Jane Lombard Gallery, New York. NY. March 11 – April 23, 2022
Featuring Ambreen Butt, “Jane Lombard Gallery (@janelombardgallery) is pleased to present ‘say the dream was real and the wall imaginary,’ a group exhibition curated by Joseph R. Wolin (@jrwolin), that brings together eight artists who investigate walls, borders, and boundaries—both physical and ideological—and ways to think beyond them.
Walls—whether delimiting rooms, dwellings, cells, properties, territories, nations or lines of jurisdiction—are designed to separate. Walls divide us; they confine us within and fence others out. But, as walls were created by us, we can imagine a world where they don’t exist. As Richard Siken’s poem suggests, we can dream past walls, because we must.
Each artist featured in ‘say the dream was real and the wall imaginary’ is in some way confronted with the blunt facts of enforced division. As such, their work not only considers the presence of walls, but how to transcend them, dreaming of futures that lack borders.”
Ambreen Butt | Artist Talk. October 12, 2022
Parlay House Dallas is hosting Ambreen Butt – an artist from Pakistan who creates works that explore the complexities of contemporary global politics, female identity, and living as a Muslim in the United States.
Parlay House is a community for women that has blossomed into a global organization that reaches thousands by providing content that opens the door for authentic conversations.
“Women in Print: Recent Acquisitions” Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH. March 2nd 2022
Featuring works by Ambreen Butt and Chitra Ganesh, “Women in Print: Recent Acquisitions” is now on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
“This exhibition debuts exciting recent acquisitions to the museum’s collection by contemporary women printmakers. From printmaking’s beginnings more than 500 years ago, techniques such as lithography and etching were often considered too physically demanding for women to pursue professionally. The medium became increasingly accessible to female artists over the past half-century as Atelier 17 in New York and the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in New Mexico, among other printshops, trained a generation of women.
Truth: Mulvane Art Museum. Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas. Feb 17th 2022
“Truth” most commonly refers to the property of being in accord with fact or reality. The social roles we inhabit, and our personal identities and experiences inform what we accept as “true.” Curated from the Mulvane Art Museum’s permanent collection, this WUmester exhibition explores the various meanings and definitions of “truth.” How do power and privilege shape who gets to make truth claims? What forces affect which “truths” are heard and believed and which are hidden, ignored, or discredited?
Click the image above to explore TRUTH through the work of Ambreen Butt.
Gallery Wendi Norris Offsite Exhibition: Fort Mason Pier 2
2 Marina Blvd, San Francisco, CA, 94123
San Francisco, CA. Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present Three Fates, featuring works by artists Ambreen Butt, Chitra Ganesh, and Eva Schlegel at Fort Mason Center Pier 2 in San Francisco. Three Fates will be the seventh exhibition in the gallery’s innovative offsite exhibition model.
In ancient cultures across the globe, Fate was understood as a cosmic force that existed beyond the control of human activity. For the Greeks, it was personified by three women so powerful that even the Olympian deities were subject to their decisions. Clotho (from whose name the English word “cloth” is derived) would spin the thread of an individual’s life. Lachesis would measure and allot it; finally Atropos—the inflexible one, the oldest of the three—would cut it, thus determining the moment of death.
As we reflect on the past year and prepare to enter a new one, beset by global powers so vast (political, medical, economic, climatological) as to feel impersonal in their reach, Gallery Wendi Norris presents the work of three artists whose diverse experience and work examine, reflect, and reckon with the vexing problems and delightful possibilities that Fate provides. Three Fates is an opportunity to reconsider in the present moment the primeval concept of Fate, as well as the role it may (or may not) play in our individual and collective lives.
Imbuing the sacred tradition of miniature painting with contemporary concerns and practices that involve sewing, cutting, weaving, and etching, Ambreen Butt (Pakistan, b. 1969, Dallas-based) gathers memories, experiences, and accounts of lives passed into her works on paper and installations. ThreeFates includes new collages from her Say My Name series. Created as a means to explore the relationship between power and vulnerability and to pay homage to innocent lives lost, each artwork incorporates the name and age of a single Afghan or Pakistani child or woman killed in U.S. drone strikes. Butt stains paper in tea, then separately and repeatedly writes or prints out the person’s name, shreds it into pieces, and arranges and glues the shredded fragments to her tea-stained paper in dense, swirling patterns. This process, undertaken with repetitive and transformational urgency, reconsiders the ripping, tearing action of a drone strike in order to elevate the names of its victims into shapes of exquisite grace and enduring strength. Three Fates also includes I am my lost diamond 2, a 9’ x 12’ floor-based installation of resin-cast digits on plexiglass that was inspired by a friend’s story of narrowly escaping a suicide bombing in a bazaar near Lahore.
In Conversation: Artist Ambreen Butt and Curator Elizabeth Mitchell. Cantor Arts, Stanford University, Stanford, California. January 22, 2022.
Art on paper can take on myriad forms and expressions, each work revealing a glimpse into the struggles and beauty of so many different worlds. Over the last decade, Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell, Interim Co-Director for the Cantor Arts Center and the Burton and Deedee McMurtry Curator overseeing prints, drawings, and photographs, has acquired a diverse collection of works on paper by artists working in the United States, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. A selection of these acquisitions are featured in the new exhibition Paper Chase: Ten Years of Collecting Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Cantor. Running from Sept. 29, 2021, through Jan. 30, 2022, this much-anticipated installation features more than 100 objects, many that have never before been exhibited at the Cantor, including multiple works by major artists from a host of different cultures, backgrounds, and countries, such as Lee Friedlander (U.S.A., b. 1934), José Clemente Orozco (Mexico, 1883–1949), Carrie Mae Weems (U.S.A., b. 1953), and Malick Sidibé (Mali, 1936–2016).
Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell, PhD Interim Co-Director, Cantor Arts Center; Burton and Deedee McMurtry Curator; Curatorial Fellowship Program Director.
Join Cantor Arts today at 6:00pm PST for a free, online event with Ambreen Butt, whose work is featured in the Cantor Arts Center’s exhibition, “Paper Chase: Ten Years of Collecting Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Cantor.”The conversation will touch on Butt’s practice and body of work, as well as topics related to contemporary global politics, female identity, and living as a Muslim in the United States.
Pages of Deception: Gallery Wendi Norris. July 16th, 2021.
“Titled ‘Pages of Deception,’ the diptych appears, from a distance, like facing folios of paper in a calligraphic Islamic manuscript, with traditional filigree borders. On closer inspection, however, these 70.5-by-45-inch “pages” are taken up with overlapping circles of shredded and collaged snippets of paper: the transcript of the 2011 terrorism trial of Egyptian American Tarek Mehanna, who was sentenced to 17 years in prison by a Boston jury. The thousands of indecipherable text fragments — the left side representing the prosecution’s closing argument, with the defense’s statement on the right — seem to swirl almost into meaninglessness, in a powerful commentary on the inscrutability of justice.” -Vanessa H. Larson, Middle Eastern arts and culture, Two Pakistani American women reinvent traditional art with unconventional subjects, Washington Post, 2019
Exhibition: What We Do in the Shadows, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. Lincoln, Massachusetts. June 25th, 2021
The artworks in ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ expose injustices against people and the environment, centering advocates and activists who fight for equality and find empowerment amid darkness. Ambreen Butt’s, Untitled (AB23), 2001, seen here, part of deCordova’s permanent collection, is included in ‘What We Do in the Shadows.’ The exhibition will be on view in the Dewey Gallery from September 12, 2021.
Artist Talk: University of the Arts, MFA Book Arts and Printmaking, Philadelphia, PA
Artist Talk: University of Texas Arlington, TX. March 31st, 2021.
On view at 8-Bridges Galleries through Saturday, February 27, 2021:
Ambreen Butt’s intricate collage works on paper celebrate formal elements of color and pattern central to traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting. Trained in these techniques in Lahore, Pakistan, Butt has re-imagined the rigorous art form. Say My Name, her most recent and ongoing series, explores the relationship between power and vulnerability in order to pay homage to innocent lives lost in international warfare. Butt’s process begins with staining the paper in tea. She then separately and repeatedly writes or prints out an individual name, shreds it into pieces, and arranges and glues the shredded fragments to her tea-stained paper in dense, swirling patterns. This process, undertaken with repetitive and transformational urgency, becomes a form of meditation. The result elevates the names into shapes of exquisite grace and enduring strength.
Opening Tomorrow | “Person of Interest”| Sheldon Museum, Lincoln, NE . January 31–July 5, 2020⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Showcasing Sheldon Museum’s extensive holdings with selected loans, this exhibition will look at the idea of portraiture and identity from multiple viewpoints and aim to open dialogue around issues such as race and representation, institutional power, and lived experience, among other topics. Included in the exhibition is Ambreen Butt whose work, Zia-ud-din (16), 2018, is part of the Sheldon collection.
When We First Arrived: The Corner at Whitman – Walker. January 25th – March 29th, 2020.
Ambreen Butt is honored to collaborate with ‘Do you know where the children are?’, an initiative by artists Mary Ellen Carroll and Michael Lucas.
“Curated by Ruth Noack, the exhibition When We First Arrived… will open on Saturday, January 25, 2020, and showcase over 100 works of art by leading visual artists, responding directly to the testimonies from children gathered by Flores investigators. It is organized in close collaboration with DYKWTCA (Do you know where the children are?), an initiative by artists Mary Ellen Carroll Studios and Lucas Michael, who invited artists to produce works with the Flores accounts that are part of the broader public awareness initiative, Project Amplify. Each work incorporates or represents an actual account (in whole or in part) of a child who was separated from their family and detained by the US government. The accounts are taken from interviews conducted by Flores investigators, which included legal, medical, and mental health experts who visited the detention facilities six months ago in June of 2019. Upon witnessing the deplorable, inhumane, and illegal conditions they found the children in, they decided it was necessary to act upon their findings. They went public.”
*The donated works of art benefit Safe Passage with Terra Firma, Innovation Law Lab and Team Brownsville.
Ambreen Butt | In The Window at Gallery Wendi Norris. December 17th, 2019.
Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present, IN THE WINDOW: “Wife and Son of Badr Mansoor,” a site-specific commission for the gallery’s headquarters by Ambreen Butt. “Wife and Son of Badr Mansoor” transforms the gallery’s Octavia-street-facing windows with an intricate 2-layer vinyl “collage.”⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
If you’re in SF, please stop by to see and say hi; the installation will be mounted through Spring 2020.
The Artist’s Eye: Ambreen Butt at Kimbell Art Museum, FortWorth, TX. October 12th, 2019.
Moderated by Jennifer Casler Price, curator of Asian, African, and Ancient American art. What does the art of the past mean to the artist of the present? In this ongoing program, artists and architects discuss works in the museum’s collection, share unique insights of the practicing professional, and relate older art to contemporary artistic concerns, including their own. Ambreen Butt will talk about several Asian paintings in the collection, discussing how various techniques employed in the creation of these works— such as the process of papermaking, layering of materials, and calligraphy as a form of mark-making-are echoed in her own artistic practice.
Artist Talk: September 25th, 2019. Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Expo Chicago: September 19 – 22 2019. On View at Gallery Wendi Norris, Booth 315.
Showing work by Ambreen Butt, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Ranu Mukherjee, Chitra Ganesh, and Eva Schlegel. Showing Ambreen Butt’s Unknown 2, 2018 and Fazal Hakim (19), 2018. Delicate yet powerful meditations on the casualties of war. Meticulously hand-cut and torn paper honors the named and unnamed children who were victims of drone strikes. The intricate material practice stems from Butt’s training in Persian miniature painting.
Panel Discussion: Asia Society Texas Center from 2-3:30 PM.
Ambreen Butt and Beili Liu discuss their work currently on view in “Site Lines: Artists Working in Texas” at the Asia Society Texas Center.
Ambreen Butt connects the long history of miniature paintings to contemporary life through her adaptation of the main tenets of the tradition in which she trained at the National College of Arts in Lahore.
Rio Intermittent, a Maria Magdalena Campos Pons project for the 13th Havana Biennial. April 15th – May 12th 2019. Matanzas, Cuba.
The conceptual platform for the 13th Havana Biennial, under the theme “The Construction of the Possible,” proposed to be a stage for exchanging ideas that would prioritize the necessity for balance between society, culture, and nature. The Havana Biennial took place for the first time ever in other Cuban cities, including Matanzas, where Intermittent Rivers took place. As an invited artist to the 13th Havana Biennial, María Magdalena Campos-Pons took the opportunity to initiate a project that would revitalize the artistic community of Matanzas. As a native of Matanzas, she has a deep understanding of the rich cultural legacy of Matanzas. She is conscious of how memory, trauma, and erasure can be resolved through transformative gestures. As Artistic Director of Intermittent Rivers, Campos-Pons appointed Octavio Zaya, Salah M. Hassan, and Selene Wendt as her curatorial team. Through this project, we sought to revitalize the city through multiple exhibitions and artistic interventions that helped renew a sense of cultural pride within the community. In selecting participating local and international artists, we emphasized social actions that would have a long-term impact on the city of Matanzas. The goal was to revitalize the local art scene and foster urban renewal through an extensive exhibition platform where local and international artists would converge. Intermittent Rivers featured over 50 local and international artists, including Ambreen Butt, Ingrid Calame, Collectivo Araigo, Iftikhar Dadi, Marilá Dardot, Manthia Diawara, Augustin Drake, Ediciones Vigia, Melvin Edwards, Guillermo Gallindo, Josephine Halvorson, Julie Mehretu, Ernesto Millan, Olu Oguibe, Ramon Pacheco, Claudia Padrón, Adriana Riera Pérez, Dawit L. Petros, Salomon, Jamaal Sheats, Tracey Snelling, Ana M. Velasco, Carrie Mae Weems, and Cosmo Whyte, among many others. Voted by Hyperallergic as one of the top 15 best exhibitions worldwide in 2019.
Site Lines: Asia Society Texas Center. Houston, TX. April 13th – August 18th 2019.
Artists Working in Texas draws connections between Asia and Texas via works by Asian American artists living in Austin, Dallas, Tyler, and Houston. Through video, drawings, paintings, installations, and collage, Ambreen Butt, Abhidnya Ghuge, Beili Liu, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, and Prince Varughese Thomas address themes such as the value of work, cultural memory, and the importance of place.
AMBREEN BUTT: Mark My Words, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Wahington, DC. Dec 7th, 2018 – April 14th, 2019.
Trained in traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting, Pakistani-American artist Ambreen Butt (b. 1969) reimagines the genre to feature contemporary female protagonists and political subject matter. While the intricate details of her works on paper invite close looking and discovery, her content tackles larger global issues of oppression, violence, and the role of art as social commentary.
This focus exhibition explores Butt’s systematic controlled gestures, patterns, and symbols that nonetheless evoke organic, spontaneous, and free-flowing movement. Mark My Words reflects the multilayered aspects of mark-making in Butt’s art through her exceptional range of techniques—including drawing, stitching, staining, etching, and gluing—while also speaking to broader ideas about women making their marks on society.
Exhibition: Comparative Perspectives on Gender Violence. At the Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nov 1st-Dec 2nd 2018.
Organized by Minakshi Chhabra, Lisa Fiore, and Sonia Perez Villanueva. Featuring artists: Catriona Baker, Juan Jose Barboza-Gubo + Andrew Mroczek, Siona Benjamin, Ambreen Butt, Nona Faustine, Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, and Katherine Shozawa.
Panel Discussion: Comparative Perspectives on Gender Violence. At the Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Panelists: Ambreen Butt and Nona Faustine. Moderated by Sarah Montross, associate curator of DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.
An Afternoon with Artist Ambreen Butt. Saturday, October 20th, 2018, at 2:00 pm. Dallas Public Library, Dallas, TX.
Event: Panel Discussion: Islamic Art Revival Series. At Irving Arts Center on October 28th, 2017.
Moderated by Justine Ludwig, Senior Curator at Dallas Contemporary, With panelists Anila Qayyum Agha, Ambreen Butt, Murad Khan Mumtaz, and Alyssa Mumtaz.
Panel Discussion: Dallas Contemporary August 13th, 2017.
In conjunction with ‘What Comes To My Lips,’ an exhibition of multi-disciplinary works of Artist Ambreen Butt, this panel took place around the themes of her work. Moderated by senior curator Justine Ludwig, the panelists also included Executive Director of Human Rights Watch Bill Holston and artist/educator/activist Clyde Valentin.
Ambreen Butt: ‘What Is Left Of Me’ opens at Dallas Contemporary.
The Exhibition features work from Butt’s multi-faceted practice from the last decade, addressing current global political oppression and violence through large-scale resin installations and collage-based works. ‘I am all what is left of me’, made from multi-colored resin casted locks and keys, references multani tile patterns, a type of Pakistani ceramic tradition that typically adorns Islamic architecture. The show opens on April 8 and will run through August 27, 2017. Location: Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX.
The Nelson-Atkins Print Society presents artist Ambreen Butt’s ‘My Divergence is My Convergence.’ an artist’s talk.
Location: Nelson-Atkins Print Society, Kansas City, MO. December 5, 2016.