Design and Art Australia Online

Kevin Butler, painter, was born on the 14th May, 1962 at Nambucca Heads, NSW. As a child, Butler was always drawing but did not begin to paint until 1988. A member of the Stolen Generations, Butler found that painting was his way of getting in touch with his Aboriginal heritage. Removed from his birth mother at the age of two weeks and then raised by a non-Aboriginal family in Sydney, at the age of 16 he left home and moved to Menangle, a rural community on the outskirts of Sydney.

Butler stayed in Menangle for five years before returning to Sydney to seek employment. He worked for Telstra for a short time and it was whilst working for Telstra that he began painting. In 1990 Butler moved to Wollongong and began his career as an artist and his first exhibition was later that same year, when he participated in a group show, 'Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow’ at the Sydney Opera House.

Between 1990 and 2007 Butler participated in 25 group exhibitions including the 2006 Parliament of NSW Indigenous Art Prize, in which he was a finalist. It was from the exhibition “Unjustified” at the Project Centre for Contemporary Art in Wollongong in 1995 that Butler sold his first work to an art institution, when Wollongong City Gallery purchased Assimilation. This work shows a grey maze with dead-ends of drugs, abuse and alcoholism among other disparate topics. A small figure attempts to find his way through the maze to the welcoming arms of home and mother that are painted above the maze in bright and happy colours.

Assimilation was Butler’s comment on being one of the Stolen Children and Butler gave Lorena Allam, the Media Officer for the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission’s 'National Inquiry into the Forced Removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families’ permission to use the Assimilation image as the Inquiry’s poster. The Australian Museum, also impressed by the work, created a three-dimensional walk through version of it for the 'Indigenous Australians’ exhibition in 1997.

In 1996 Butler was granted 'Artist In Residency’ at Wollongong City Art Gallery. The Gallery gave him 24 hour access to a studio within its building and a solo show at the end of the year. This exhibition, ’50,208 From Dreams to Screams’ is Butler’s only solo exhibition (as at 2007) and the exhibition featured works that commented on the Stolen Generations and environmental and political concerns that affected Aboriginal people at that time. Butler’s commitment to his community is very strong. Between 1993 and 2007 he produced 27 murals at local libraries, primary schools including five for Bass Hill Primary School and one for the Wollongong Youth Centre in December 1993, where he worked alongside children of the delegates from the 1993 World Indigenous Peoples Conference: Education. In 1996 he painted the hood of a car that was used in the Variety Club of Australia’s 'Bondi to Batchelor Bash’ car rally and in 1997 he donated a painting for the Cancer Foundation of NSW to auction.

Butler has received many art awards and awards in recognition to his services to his community including winning the 1993 Mil-Pra AECG 'Dream for the Future, Working in Unity’ art competition and the 1994 Illawarra Sexual Health Unit’s 'Aids and the Koori Family’ art competition. In 2004 he was the recipient of Wollongong City Council’s NAIDOC Award presented for recognition of his contribution to public arts within the local government area.

In 2007 Butler was still working in the area of community arts and group shows and says that “like many other indigenous artists, the work that I produce comes from the heart. My artworks contain personal issues such as the Stolen Generations and are created with a lot of my own emotions that I transfer onto canvas.”

Writers:

Allas, Tess Note:

Date written:

2007

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed