Bio, 2025
About her work: Drawing and writing form the foundation of Sharon Butler’s abstract painting practice. In 2016, she became fascinated with drawing on her phone, posting a digital sketch on Instagram each day. Over time, after creating more than a thousand drawings, the geometric language that emerged became the basis for her paintings. Her work is characterized by a tendency toward Casualism, a term she coined in an article published in The Brooklyn Rail to describe an approach to painting that values imperfection, incompleteness, and process over polished forms.\
While she was a professor at Eastern Connecticut State University (2000-13), she was drawn to the intersection of art, writing, and emerging digital platforms, and she started an online studio project called Two Coats of Paint, which has grown into an award-winning blogazine dedicated to painting.
At its core, she says, her practice is driven by a deep curiosity about the mysterious interplay between emotion, intellect, and the act of painting itself.
Biography: Sharon Butler (b. 1959, New London, Connecticut) moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after earning degrees at Tufts University (BA), Massachusetts College of Art, (BFA), and the University of Connecticut (MFA). She has held solo exhibitions in NYC at Jennifer Baahng Gallery, Theodore Gallery, Pocket Utopia, and Central Fine Arts; in Connecticut at Slater Memorial Museum, Real Art Ways, and Furnace Art on Paper Archive; in Seattle at SEASON; and in the university galleries at University of Alabama, University of Connecticut, and SUNY Westchester. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, artcritical, The New Criterion, and New York Magazine. She has received awards from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation, Yaddo, Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
She lives and works in Long Island City, Queens.
Website: Sharon L. Butler
Instagram: @Sharon_Butler
Bluesky: @sharonbutler
