Deborah Butterfield: Organized by The Yellowstone Museum, Montana
Sponsored by Verizon Hawaii
May 21 - July 25, 2004

Organized by Yellowstone Art Museum, this survey presents the work of internationally acclaimed Montana sculptor Deborah Butterfield. The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Butterfield’s art, showcasing 16 of her magnificent horse sculptures and celebrating the release of her first major monograph, published by Henry N. Abrams in 2003. The majority of the horses in the show are on loan from the artist’s personal collection, and have rarely, if ever, been seen by the public.

An enormously popular and significant American sculptor, Deborah Butterfield first gained wide notice at the 1979 Whitney Biennial. Horses have been the single, sustained focus of Butterfield’s work for over 20 years—a remarkably prolonged, disciplined and ultimately poetic inquiry into our relationship with the organic world, with other life forms and with ourselves. Her early work, fragile forms created from mud, sticks and straw, as well as full-sized horses constructed of sticks and found metal, evoked horses either standing or resting on the ground. Since the mid-1980s she has been creating full-size and smaller works from sticks and branches, and casting the finished sculpture in bronze.

Deborah Butterfield received both a BA and an MFA degree from the University of California at Davis. She has taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Montana State University, Bozeman. She exhibits widely and has been commissioned by numerous significant museums and public sites, including the Urban Development Corporation of Boston, Massachusetts, for a sculpture in Copley Square; the Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Portland, Oregon, International Airport; and the Denver Art Museum. Her honors and awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship.

This exhibition is generously sponsored by The Meadowlark Fund, David Orser and Ossie Abrams, Dr. Don and Carol Roberts, Buchanan Capital LLC, Norma and Gary Buchanan and The Greg Kucera Gallery. The presentation of this exhibition in Honolulu is supported in part by American Airlines.