Press release for "Eugenia Butler – Arc of an Idea: Chasing the Invisible, A 35-Year Survey"

              installations, mixed-media drawings and scrolls, and recent color-drenched paintings of mysterious orbs.
Butler’s “arc” is in the best sense of the word idiosyncratic—personal, obstinate, and outside the mainstream. She has been nurtured by California rather than New York sensibility, by an unstylish commitment to modernist ideas of the spiritual in art rather than by irony and identity issues, and by a lived feminism.
A 48-page catalog (designed by Meryl Pollen) with color plates and essays by Barry Sanders, Professor of Intellectual History, Pitzer College, and Anne Ayres, curator of the exhibition, will accompany the exhibition. The catalog will be available at the Maltz Gallery on Sunday, December 7, 2003 at 3pm in conjunction with a publication party and a conversational event led by Eugenia Butler. The conversational event will be a group dialogue on the idea of the invisible, led by Butler in conversation with, among others, an art historian, a philosopher, and an astronomer. Butler is well known in Los Angeles for organizing a series of dialogues called “Fire in the Library,” that attract large audiences of artists, thinkers, and students. Butler is also well known for another collaborative project called the Book of Lies, an ultimately four-volume portfolio series containing original work of over 100 artists on the nature of truth and lies. The three volumes completed of the Book of Lies will be on view concurrent with the exhibition at the Grunwald Study Center at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood. Viewing is by appointment only, call (310) 443-7078 to schedule an appointment.
Eugenia Butler, an early innovator in the conceptual art movement, has been an artist for over thirty years. She works and exhibits internationally. A graduate of UC Berkeley, she has held appointments as an Associate Professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, an Adjunct Professor at California State Universities, a Lecturer at Art Center College of Design, and is an artist in residence with the Music Center Education Program. The entirety of her practice – studio art, teaching, the dialogues and performances, collaborative works, and public art – is generated through investigative work predicated upon “going beyond what I know, to what I do not know.” A year 2000 recipient of a fellowship from the Jackson Pollock/Lee Krasner Foundation, Butler’s work has been exhibited by institutions including the Lannan Foundation, the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle and the Leverkusen Museum in Germany, the Monterrey Museum, the Folk and Craft Museum in Los Angeles, the Reading Museum in Pennsylvania, and galleries and other institutions in the United States and Europe.
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