The works are small, but when I’m working they’re huge...They become universes to me. The beads are sculpted so that each one is handcarved in place. They can take two solid weeks of carving and then glazing them. It’s backbreaking work, and so it’s funny how they’re small, and they’re delicate, but they’re backbreaking.
Kathy Butterly
Kathy Butterly b. 1963
Kathy Butterly is an acclaimed American ceramic artist known for her meticulously crafted, small-scale sculptures that blur the boundaries between abstraction and figuration. Born in Amityville, New York, Butterly earned her BFA from Moore College of Art in Philadelphia in 1986 and later completed her MFA at the University of California, Davis, in 1990, where she studied under renowned ceramicist Robert Arneson. Butterly’s training in the California Funk art movement, which emphasized unconventional, humorous, and often irreverent approaches to ceramics, deeply influenced her practice, though she has since developed a style uniquely her own.
Butterly's work is characterized by her intricate manipulation of clay, creating highly textured, brightly colored pieces that suggest both organic and anthropomorphic forms and are inspired by a diverse variety of sources from George Ohr to Asian ceramics to California Funk. Her sculptures are small, no larger than a few inches, but they are packed with detail and complexity. Each piece is hand-built and manipulated multiple times in the kiln, as Butterly layers glaze upon glaze, and re-works the surfaces until the finished object reaches the desired balance of texture, color, and form. This labor-intensive process, combined with her intuitive approach to shaping and glazing, results in sculptures that seem to pulsate with life, full of unexpected twists, bulges, and openings.
Throughout her career, Butterly has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and inclusion in a Carnegie International. Her work has been exhibited in major institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tang Teaching Museum, among others. In addition to her individual success, she has played a significant role in pushing the boundaries of contemporary ceramics, helping to elevate the medium to a new level of critical recognition and artistic possibility.
Butterly continues to live and work in New York, where she creates pieces that challenge perceptions of both sculpture and ceramics. Her works are part of many permanent collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Detroit Institute of Arts, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco. With her distinctive style and devotion to craft, she remains one of the most influential ceramic artists of her generation, continuously testing the limits of what can be achieved with clay.
