In the spirited and mischievous Buildingdrawing, Sharon Butler has merged the languages of
drawing and sculpture by hanging drawings, interspersed with elements of collage and
installation, with curtain clips on a rolling grid of metal shelves.
Inspired by peddlers’ carts, the shelves are replete with motley objects and function as portable
mini-galleries or project spaces. They can be maneuvered around the gallery, so that the
drawings and other items sway, jingle, and jostle, like housewares sold itinerantly in a different
era.

Nearby, double-sided drawings, installed in transparent holders, emerge from the wall at a 90-
degree angle, rendering both sides visible.

Critic Thomas Micchelli has observed that Butler’s work shares “Rauschenberg’s dissolution of
the barriers between painting and sculpture.” As the freewheeling (so to speak) and
improvisational nature of the exhibition suggests, Butler sees process as metaphor and makes
paintings and drawings in part to document her life and experiences. 
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.