Ambreen Butt

Ambreen Butt (born 1969) is a Pakistani-American artist based in Boston, known mainly for her drawings, paintings, prints and collages. She matters because she has carried the tradition of Indian and Persian miniature painting into contemporary debates about feminism, human rights and gender roles.

She trained at the National College of Arts in Lahore, where she earned a bachelor's degree in traditional Indian and Persian miniature painting. She moved to Boston in 1993 and received a master's degree in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1997. Her self-portraits and compositions pair the intricate decorative patterning of miniature painting with imagery drawn from newspapers and historical depictions. One well-known work, I Am My Lost Diamond (2011), made for her Realms of Intimacy exhibition in Cincinnati, uses more than 20,000 resin-cast fingers and toes that read as fireworks or blossoms from a distance; it was inspired by a friend who narrowly escaped a suicide bombing in Lahore.

Butt also works in printmaking, as in her 2008 series Dirty Pretty, and has adopted newer materials such as PET film, thread and collage. Her work has been shown at the Worcester Art Museum and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and a large piece honouring Mukhtar Mai was displayed on the exterior of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.