Horses of a Different Color

P.S. These are not horses. The title of equine sculptor Deborah Butterfield’s upcoming retrospective at UC Davis’ Manetti Shrem Museum is taken from the last line of a poem that one of her mentors at the school, the painter William T. Wiley, once wrote in celebration of her deceptively figurative work. 

Butterfield earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UCD in the early 1970s, when her alma mater boasted an art faculty that included now-renowned artists like Wiley, Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri and Roy De Forest. In those halcyon days, the university’s art department was the kind of place where students and professors worked closely together. And Butterfield’s new exhibit, which will open Oct. 1 and run for nearly nine months until June 24, is both a tribute to one of its most notable graduates, and a celebration of that collaborative spirit.

“That’s the way Davis was,” says Gloria Marchant, Butterfield’s friend and De Forest’s widow. “Deborah spoke at Roy’s memorial at SFMOMA, and she said that the artists who taught there invited the students to the table of art.” 

Fifteen of Butterfield’s monumental, outsized horse sculptures will be on view as part of her first solo museum show in her native California in nearly 30 years, from early iterations made of sticks and mud, to more recent works cast in bronze and assembled in her Montana studio. They will be displayed alongside works by her professors and colleagues in a complementary presentation titled Kindred Spirits, which will include two horse pieces by De Forest, and a pair of works by Arneson that mirror and illustrate Butterfield’s fascination with the fine line between representation and abstraction. 

Because, as Wiley astutely if playfully noted, Butterfield’s horses are not just horses. They are abstracts. They can represent self-portraits, or portraits of family and friends. They can also be radical acts of environmental salvage. “Debbie has always been interested in the environment,” says the exhibit’s curator and Manetti Shrem’s founding director Rachel Teagle. “In the very first works of mud and clay, she figured out how to make art from her backyard. The scrap metal work came from clearing fences on her ranch.” One poetic bit of environmental commentary in the retrospective will be 2016’s Three Sorrows, a horse made of scraps of plastic flotsam and found objects that washed up after an earthquake-triggered tsunami hit Japan in 2011 and led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster. 

An equine “portrait” of Butterfield’s husband, John Buck, at the lobby of the Manetti Shrem Museum (© 2023 Deborah Butterfield / licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society [ARS], NY. Photo courtesy of Walla Walla Foundry and the Manetti Shrem Museum)

Butterfield herself first took the art world by storm in 1979 when she was included in the Whitney Biennial in New York. Today she’s in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian, as well as in prominent public areas like the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, which also features works by iconic artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Alexander Calder, Richard Serra, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Indiana. Her sculptures have also stood tall in uniquely private spaces—for example, she was commissioned to create a horse for each of Robin Williams’ three children to grace his Napa ranch. Unlike many artists who work in bronze and produce multiple editions of a sculpture, every Butterfield is unique, and in 2016, one of her equine masterpieces, Setsuko (1994), sold for a record $468,500.

The delight of seeing so large a “herd” assembled under one roof is to see the progression of Butterfield’s methods and materials. A 1978 “reclining horse” is constructed of twigs, straw and mud, while John (1984)—a “portrait” of her husband, fellow artist and Davis alum John Buck—is made from scrap metal.

The most recent work in the show is Bow Tie (2021-22)—a horse assembled from wildfire-charred wood then cast into bronze. Once again, Butterfield has created beauty out of tragedy in an inimitable, indelible way. As Wiley wrote in his title-giving poem, “Look at Debbie’s horses. You’ll remember.”

You Might Also Like

A New Path Forward – The Gorman Museum at UC Davis

The Sweet Life – Wayne Thiebaud

“By Any Means Necessary, I Will Keep Being an Artist.” – UC Davis professor Mike Henderson