For the first time, Guild Hall's annual Artist Members Exhibition will run concurrently with a solo show of work by the Top Honors winner from its previous iteration. "Somewhere in Time," an exhibition of paintings by Michael A. Butler, last year's winner, and the 86th members show will open Sunday and continue through Jan. 10.
Butler, who was awarded top prize by Storm Ascher, an independent curator, writer, and founder of the Superposition Gallery and the Hamptons Black Arts Council, is a self-taught artist who has described himself as an "intuitive" or "narrative folk artist." Unlike outsider artists, however, who are also self-taught, Butler is knowledgeable about art and art history, has exhibited widely for more than 30 years, and at one time directed an art gallery in Sag Harbor.
In a 2020 interview in The Star, he cited Henri Rousseau, Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence as artists whose work he admired. He also noted the bold bright colors and repetitive images sometimes found in Haitian painting.
Butler's small-scale paintings draw on mythology, religion, dreams, and storytelling to shed light on overlooked histories, especially those of enslaved and Indigenous communities on the East End. "I try to document historical things that there are no depictions of. I've done some characters who lived in Eastville," the Sag Harbor neighborhood that has been a home to free Blacks, Native Americans, and European immigrants from the early 1800s until the mid-1900s.
Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, Butler fashions imagined realities that merge historical fact and creative imagination, "echoing a poetic, dreamlike spirit while asserting a distinctly contemporary voice," according to Guild Hall. He reimagines collective memory as an active, evolving narrative, creating visual allegories from fragments of history.
Butler's father's family began spending summers in Eastville in the early 1920s, and his mother's family came there in 1930. They purchased a number of small cottages, and while growing up he spent summers there until moving to Sag Harbor full time in 1988.
Butler has served on the board of the Eastville Community Historical Society for more than 20 years, holding positions as president, vice president, and recording secretary. He is now chairman of the St. David A.M.E. Zion Church Cemetery, serves as board secretary for the Long Island Museum of American Art, History, and Carriages in Stony Brook, and is a lifetime member of the N.A.A.C.P.
The Artist Members Exhibition, a fixture on the calendar since 1938, is the oldest nonjuried museum exhibition on Long Island. It typically features more than 300 works in a variety of mediums, with established artists presented alongside emerging ones. Past exhibitors have included James Brooks, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Alfonso Ossorio, and Jackson Pollock.
This year's juror is Marcela Guerrero, the DeMartini Family Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Top Honors winner will have a solo show at Guild Hall next year.
A preview day and opening reception for members will happen on Saturday. Both exhibitions have been organized by Melanie Crader, museum director and curator of visual arts, with support from Brianna Hernandez, museum registrar, and Claire Hunter, museum coordinator and curatorial associate.
