Celebrating Deborah Butterfield's Work

Artist Deborah Butterfield received a lifetime achievement award in Fall 2022 from the International Sculpture Center, bestowed annually to individual sculptors who are masters of sculptural processes and techniques and have made exemplary contributions to the field of sculpture. Butterfield’s work is best known for the use of natural materials and found objects to create a psychological portrait of her abstracted equine forms. Born on the same day as the 75th running of the Kentucky Derby, Butterfield has been passionate about horses from a young age. Butterfield’s tranquil horses stand in opposition of traditional depictions in painting and sculpture as raging stallions symbolic of male power. Better known for her life-size horse sculptures constructed from painted bronze cast from wood, Barnswallow, on display in the Goodyear Gallery at the Richard and Carole Cocks Art Museum, is characteristic of her early work - a small-scale representation of a horse characterized by sticks, daubs of mud and feathers from the bird for which it is named.