Kathy Butterly

Published with Tang Museum at Skidmore College.

Clever, mischievous, seductive, defiant—for over three decades, American sculptor Kathy Butterly (born 1963) has captivated viewers with her experimental and expressive ceramic works. Her signature small-scale porcelain and earthenware pieces evoke a range of moods, incorporating surprising color and textures in her masterful deployment of ceramic techniques. In a gesture that veers toward iconoclasm, Butterly contorts traditional vessel forms, producing biomorphic, individualistic creations that seem to bend and fold. Every detail of a Butterly sculpture—from pools of orange glaze to pearlescent beads of clay—is an essential part of its composition. Published concurrently with Butterly's expansive exhibition at the Tang Museum, Assume Yes is a major monographic survey of her sculptural and ceramic work. It spans over 30 years and features color plates of more than 200 artworks from 1994 to a selection of brand-new pieces.

ColorForm is the first major monograph on the work of New York sculptor Kathy Butterly (born 1963). Encompassing 60 sculptures and 20 drawings from throughout Butterly’s career, all of which are reproduced here, it focuses mainly on the last ten years of her work.

Butterly is well known for her sculptures that challenge the conventions of ceramic tradition through oblique figurations of the body, with shapes that evoke mouths, feet and genitalia. Her work, which stands in historical dialogue with that of Ken Price, Viola Frey and Robert Arneson, engages with the politics of 20th-century femininity even as it leans ever closer to abstraction.

The works collected here chart the evolution of Butterly’s sensibilities and philosophical stance, tracking the development of her highly personal yet immediate and accessible ceramic language from explorations of the body to personhood and autobiography.