David Butler

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Portrait

About the artist

1898–1997, lived and worked in Patterson, Louisiana

One of the first recognized stars of Southern African-American yard art, David Butler installed a fantastic tin zoological environment on and outside his home in Patterson, Louisiana, over the course of several decades. Acclaimed Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson and others have traced the venerable—though once ignored—vernacular tradition of elaborate yard displays to African, particularly Kongo, rituals and aesthetics. However, the practitioners of yard art often dismiss specifically aesthetic analysis of their work; they may not necessarily consider themselves artists.

     Butler only turned to art in middle age, after a work-related injury at a sawmill. His mother was a missionary, and religion motivated his artistic vision to a certain extent. But he managed to bridge his private environment and the broader art world, first rising to prominence with the landmark 1982 exhibition “Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980” at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery. Only a year later, his yard environment was dismantled when illness required him to move in with family, and Butler’s prolific and site-specific practice transformed into the production of discrete objects intended for sale on the art market.

     The classic works for which he is known are brightly-colored tin cut-outs, sometimes incorporating found objects, mounted both in windows and on poles and stakes in his yard. Butler constructed a vast menagerie of creatures—which he referred to as “critters”—drawing from Biblical sources and mythological scenes alike. In Butler’s world, hydras, elephants, bicycles, and Jonah’s whale coexist, all rendered in an abstracted, planar geometry that defies static representation for a fluid dynamism. That dynamism developed into actual kinetic sculptures in many cases—a series of spinning “whirligigs,” windmills, and weathervanes accompanied his figurative animal pieces. Functioning as totemic signposts, Butler’s formally inventive sculptures may also be read as paintings. Painted in bold swathes of earth tones and electric hues, they exist in the interstices between representational sculpture and two-dimensional graphic abstraction. In the original yard works, polka-dot patterns poke out beneath an accumulated patina of rust—time reveals itself in weather effects, fading, and oxidation, offering yet another unexpected dimension to the work. Butler’s work resides in the collections of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, among others.

—Brendan Greaves

Above: Portrait of David Butler c. 1980-89, ©Richard D. Gasperi

 

Bibliography

Baking in the Sun: Visionary Images from the South—Selections from the Collection of Sylvia and Warren Lowe. Lafayette, LA: University Art Museum, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1987.
 
Black Art, Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with the Dallas Museum of Art, 1989.
 
Common Ground/Uncommon Vision: The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art. Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1993.
 
David Butler. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art, 1976.
 
Dream Singers, Story Tellers: An African-American Presence. Trenton, NJ: New Jersey State Museum, 1992.
 
Enisled Visions: The Southern Non-Traditional Folk Artist. Mobile, AL: Fine Arts Museum of the South, 1987.
 
Let It Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection. Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, in association with the University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 2001.
 
Lewis, Samella, “David Butler.” International Review of African American Art 11, no. 1 (1993): 30–35.
 
Livingston, Jane and John Beardsley. Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1982.
 
Muffled Voices: Folk Artists in Contemporary America. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, 1986.
 
Outside the Mainstream: Folk Art in Our Time. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1988.
 
Perry, Regenia A. “Contemporary African American Folk Art in America: An Overview.” International Review of African American Art 11, no. 1 (1993): 4–30.
 
Perry, Regenia A. What It Is: Black American Folk Art from the Collection of Regenia Perry. Richmond, VA: Virginia Commonwealth University, 1982.
 
Rambling on My Mind: Black Folk Art of the Southwest. Dallas: Museum of African-American Life and Culture, 1987.
 
Russell, Charles, ed. Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
 
Southern Folk Images: David Butler, Henry Speller, Bill Traylor. New Orleans: University of New Orleans, 1984.
 
A Time to Reap: Late-Blooming Folk Artists. South Orange, NJ: Seton Hall University/Museum of American Folk Art, 1985.
 
Trechsel, Gail Andrews, ed. Pictured in My Mind: Contemporary American Self-taught Art from the Collection of Kurt Gitter and Alice Rae-Yelen. Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, in association with University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

Umberger, Leslie. Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds: Built Environments of Vernacular Artists. Sheboygan, WI: John Michael Kohler Arts Center, in association with Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.
 
Yelen, Alice Rae. Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art in association with University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1994.
 

Artwork


30 South 17th Street, 12th floor | Philadelphia, PA 19103-4196 | 215.979.1155