Sixteen in 1968, Tom Butter saw the left split at the Fillmore East in New York City, with American activist Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin aka H. Rap Brown, 5th chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Herbert Marcuse, Carl Oglesby, Pete Seeger, and Bernadine Dohrn of the Weather Underground. Deeply moved by these events he left Long Island for Antioch College (1970), and the Hobart Institute of Welding Technology (1972), before turning to art. Working in a jack factory in Philadelphia he studied drawing, sculpture and printmaking at the Philadelphia College of Art (BFA, 1975), driving cabs and repairing truck springs on the side, moving to St. Louis to study color, sentiment and aesthetics with William Gass (On Being Blue: 1976) at Washington University (MFA, 1977). He moved to New York City in 1977; hanging sheetrock, swinging artwork out the window of a fifth floor walk-up, assisting Nancy Graves in her studio before passing that torch in 1983 to younger artists who, like Tom, are totally into working. Sculpture isn’t a story, it’s a state. 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. He built a sculpture studio in the southern Catskills in 1990. Notable group exhibitions include 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 in memory of Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe; among others. Interviews with Alice Aycock, Sanford Biggers, Meredith James, David Novros, Mary Heilmann, and Dan Walsh explore their fields. 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. The works are 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. Tom Butter continues to live and work in New York.
