Bisa Butler’s medium is textiles. She trained as a painter at Howard University, where many of her professors were part of a collective called Africobra, which developed an aesthetic and a color palette that reflected the experience of Black Americans. In 2001, pregnant with her first child and worried about the toxicity of oils, Butler took up the humble tradition of quilting—with thrilling results. Michael Gitlitz, executive director at the Katonah Museum of Art, has described her wall-sized works as “quilted collages of stunning virtuosity. She uses vivid and conceptually complex West African textiles to paint narratives, and I use the term paint in quotation marks because it is all sewn.” Each work takes over 1,000 hours to create. Each is a tour de force. This exhibition presents a new body of work, Butler’s response to American norms of equality and fairness now destabilized by political backlash. She looks to artists she admires—Faith Ringgold, Kerry James Marshall—and takes her title from the first line of a song that Louis Armstrong sang, “La Vie En Rose.” —Laura Jacobs