Tom Butter

Tom Butter lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Studio 10 in Brooklyn; Dartmouth College in New Hampshire; Nina Freudenheim Gallery in Buffalo; Lawrence Oliver Gallery in Philadelphia; Bergguren Gallery in San Francisco; Grace Borgenicht Gallery and Curt Marcus Gallery in New York City, among others. The work is held in public, private and institutional collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, The Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis Minnesota, among others. Sixteen in 1968 on Long Island’s North Shore, Tom Butter saw H. Rap Brown speak at the Filmore East (New York: 1968) with Herbert Marcuse. Butter left his studies at Antioch College (1970) for The Hobart Institute of Welding Technology in Troy Ohio (cert., 1972) before turning to art, sculpture and printmaking specifically. Butter studied drawing at the Philadelphia College of Art (BFA, 1975) and Washington University in St. Louis Missouri (MFA, 1977) where he studied with William Gass when he published ‘On Being Blue’. In 1977, preoccupied with color and sentiment, Butter moved to New York City’s Chinatown, followed by the Lower East Side, Bushwick Brooklyn, and East New York. Sculpture isn’t a story, its a state. He worked as Nancy Graves studio assistant from 1978 to 1983. After swinging large scale works out of five floor walk up he established a sculpture studio in the Western Catskills in 1990. He works with steel in a concatenation of color and form. His work has been included in group exhibitions including Art for the Eighties in Caracas, Venezuela, New Work | New York, curated by Marcia Tucker at The New Museum; Sculpture Inside Outside originated at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and travelled to The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas; and Beauty is a Blast for Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe; among others. To explore the broader questions about the field Tom Butter worked with Alice Aycock, Sanford Biggers, Meredith James, David Novros, Mary Heilmann, and Dan Walsh among others, on a series of interviews for Whitehot Magazine. Reviews of Butter’s work have been published in journals including Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Bomb Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, and papers of record including The New Yorker, and The New York Times.