Sharon Butler

Sharon Butler is an American artist and arts writer. She is known for teasing out ideas about contemporary abstraction in her paintings, drawings, and written work, and particularly for a style she called "new casualism" in an influential 2011 essay published in The Brooklyn Rail. She coined the term to identify a distinctive incarnation of abstraction that featured a self-amused, anti-heroic style notable for off-kilter composition and a sense of impermanence. Artists’ apparent interest in irresolution, she suggested, reflected the percolating uncertainty and instability of culture and society. Like casualism itself, Buildingdrawing is playful – even whimsical – in the moment but grounded in serious considerations about life, art, and the future.

Butler has been awarded the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and the Creative Capital/ Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Program Grant. She has also received residencies from Counterproof Press, Yaddo, and the Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program.