Newsletter, February 24, 2024
The shortest month, solo at the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, studio news, more
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February is one of my favorite months. It’s short. It’s cozy. Everyone is thinking about love, and the light is finally beginning to change. In the studio I’m working on a new series of multi-panel paintings and some two-sided drawings. “March,” my solo show at the Sarah Moody Gallery at the University of Alabama, opens on the 27th. If you’re in Alabama, I hope you’ll stop by and check out the show. (I know. Alabama.Sigh.)
From the press release:
The Sarah Moody Gallery of Art is pleased to present the exhibition, Sharon Butler: March, February 27 through April 5, 2024. Butler will present a lecture about her artwork on Wednesday, March 20, at 3:00 p.m. in the Camellia Room of Gorgas Library (2nd floor). There will be a reception for the artist following the lecture in the SMGA from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m.
Sharon Butler is an American artist and writer on art interested in ideas about contemporary abstraction, especially in a style she identifies as “new casualism.” Butler describes her paintings and drawings as exploring “the tension between exacting, mechanical processes — often digital and screen-based — and the humanism inherent in images and objects made by hand.” And, she writes, “the slippage between the two.”
2007, Butler founded Two Coats of Paint, an NYC blogazine. The project has expanded to include a small residency program, podcast, small press, and other initiatives. Between 2016 and 2020, she became obsessed with drawing on her phone, posting one digital drawing each day on Instagram. The visual language developed in these tiny digital images — the ‘Good Morning Drawings’ — eventually became the basis for the paintings she continues to make today.
Sharon Butler’s solo exhibitions in New York at Jennifer Baahng Gallery, Theodore Art, and Pocket Utopia have been written about in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, artcritical, The New Criterion, The James Kalm Report, Time Out New York, Tussle, and New York Magazine. She has received awards and residencies from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation, Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Connecticut State University, Pollock Krasner Foundation, Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, Pocket Utopia and Counterproof Press at the University of Connecticut. She holds an MFA from the University of Connecticut and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art. Butler lives in Queens, NY, and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Funding for this exhibition is provided by the Farley Moody Galbraith Endowed Exhibition Fund
Other News:
“Big Tent” is the title of a 14-artist group show I’m curating for 2024 Dumbo Open Studios. I haven’t selected the work yet, but I’ll have more details and artist links in time for the March newsletter. I recently got word (along with the other residents in the Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program) that my lease is no longer renewable at the subsidized rate, so 2024 could be the last year I’ll be participating in Dumbo Open Studios. Whatever happens, though, it’s been a good run. If you have any leads for studio space in the city, please send them my way. Thank you!
Please go to the studio website to see more images of recent work and for info about past projects and exhibitions.
Next: If you’re a subscriber, the March newsletter will arrive in your inbox on the 25th. In the meantime, I’ll be publishing a piece on recent studio visits with artists Zach Seeger and Patrick Neal. Thanks for reading.