Frances Butler

Early life and education

Butler was born in Webster Groves, Missouri. She claimed (in jest) descent from a treasurer of the Confederacy. Her father, Robert Denholme Clark, was a petrochemist, who relocated to Berkeley, California, where Frances attended Willard Junior High. The family lived in a ranch-style house in the forested hills above the Claremont Hotel.

When her parents later relocated to Tehran, Frances and her younger brother, William, attended the American School in Beirut while their parents were in Iran.

Back in Berkeley, she finished high school, and received an honors degree in History from University of California, Berkeley in 1961. Frances then attended Stanford University, where she earned her masters in History as a Woodrow Wilson fellow (summa cum laude). She would ride a Vespa across the San Francisco Bay Bridge to get there. The old western span of the bridge had expansion breaks every 50 feet, through which a strong gust of wind blew.

Marriage and career

She married Jonathan Butler, a Romance philologist and polymath, and with a travel grant they lived in Sardinia for a year, where he wrote a dictionary of Sardinian. Escaping cold weather, they made trips to London, Heidelberg, and Florence.

After receiving an M.A. in Design in 1965, Frances began teaching in the Design Department at Berkeley. She influenced David Lance Goines, loaning him the book on Weimar-era posters on which he based his style. The Design Department was the center for the anti-Vietnam War protest movement, and many protest posters and banners were created in the college. It was eventually closed, popularly thought to be at the orders of Governor Reagan, but insiders say it was the college administrators who did not care for design. During this time, in the late sixties, Frances created posters and graphic design on commission and sewed a series of two dozen or more dresses and coats.

After the closure of the Department of Design, she took a teaching position at University of California, Davis, where her husband taught Italian, but they bought a house and lived in Berkeley. They started a textile printing company, Goodstuffs, in Emeryville in 1969 to manufacture screen-printed running yardage after her designs, which sold well, with her husband as manager.

The great tragedy of her life was a car accident on New Year's Day 1974, when a drunk ran into their Volkswagen Beetle: Jonathan was killed and Frances was in a coma for a month. Then she was in rehabilitation learning to walk again.

A year later, in April 1975, Berkeley Library School professor Roger Levenson suggested she take over teaching his class at The Bancroft Library, "Printing on the Handpress." She went to Arif Press in Berkeley, where she met Alastair Johnston who helped her with typesetting and printing. She invited him to be her teaching assistant, and this led to the founding of Poltroon Press.

She wrote a doctoral thesis on American designer Will Bradley, which she submitted to the Library School at Berkeley, but she was told by the dean, Robert Harlan, she couldn't be a Berkeley student at the same time as she was a professor at another campus. She then started over and wrote a new dissertation on the cosmology of Portuguese immigrant gardens in California (this was inspired by her friendship with architectural historian John Beach), which she submitted to the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley. During this time, the mid-1980s, she gave a course of guest lectures at Berkeley which were well-attended. Her lectures covered everything from Persian textiles, to cosmologies in garden design, to her passion for primitive and folk art. When she was defending her thesis, one committee member said, "We should be getting a degree from you!"

Textile art

Frances Butler began making clothes in the 1960s. She made several dozen unique dresses in a collage technique with pieces of fabric from a large collection, both purchased and inherited from her mother who had made clothes for her as a child. http://www.poltroonpress.com/engineered-dresses-by-frances-c-butler/

She designed & printed posters for a film society in Berkeley, and worked on other design commissions.

She created two "Pillow books" in silkscreen. The first "Peach Skin Preface" (1970), is a story of the birth of twins as a parody of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, the second "as a companion to fluff-up the pillow, was called 'BananaMan in Switzerland' and was, of all things, a critique of the then dominant style of grid-system Helvetica-based Swiss graphic design. I mocked this style with a dog shaped biscuit eating a bowl-full of Swiss-style Swiss cheese."

In 1971 Butler had the idea of designing running yardage to replicate some of her visual ideas so the garments wouldn't have to be pieced together, but could be made from fabric of her own design. With her husband, she established Goodstuffs Handprinted Fabrics in Emeryville, California.

Goodstuffs was set up in a block-long loft that had three long screen-printing tables, 5 feet wide and about 200 feet long, that were covered in waxed canvas. At one end was attached a bolt of heavy-duty white cotton which could be unrolled and stretched the entire length of the table and held down by the wax. A metal rail along one side had adjustable stops attached to it that would serve as guides for registering multiple silkscreens. These screens were on varnished waterproof wooden stretchers that were 6 to 8 feet long and four feet wide. Based on designs cut in rubylith film by Butler, and then exposed with a carbon-arc lamp and washed out in a walk-in shower, the screens were complex and could be registered very closely, allowing for far more detail than seen in contemporary fabric art such as Marimekko of Finland, which tended to have simple non-overlapping shapes.

In the book 5000 Years of Textiles, edited by Jennifer Harris (British Museum Press & the Victoria & Albert Museum, 1993), Chapter 9 focuses on Colonial North America. This brief overview reports (p. 262), "By the mid-1930s California's distinct style had aroused national interest, and its burgeoning clothing industry, soon to be second only to New York’s, helped to support small enterprises such as California Handprints … and in the 1960s and 70s Frances Butler’s Goodstuffs, as well as larger firms."

Garden art

Butler remodeled her backyard garden in the 1970s, first with wooden lattices that were made to resemble collapsing trellises she had seen in Portuguese immigrant gardens. These were old vine arbors; she liked the shadows cast by these structures and so installed some nylon screens with cut-out letters to cast moving shadows, the texts were provided by her press partner Alastair Johnston, who came up with "Heliogabalus" for above the rose beds, and "L8R"; she also used a version of Piet Zwart's ad for NKF reading "Hot Spots" with a giant O in the middle, and Tom Raworth's phrase "Light & Heavy Light." When the wood letters also decayed, she replaced some of them with cut-out plastic ones. In order to "dog proof" her flower beds from her Queensland Blue Heelers, she next constructed cinderblock towers for the roses and covered them in mosaics. This occupied her from 1980-89 as she discovered new techniques of colored cast concrete. In turn this led her to make some inlaid mosaic tables and other mosaic works. Ultimately she perfected this technique on the walls of her French farm where she told the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in crépi coloré and mosaic.

There were at least two other major garden projects. One was done with a Seattle artist Peter Requem for a roof terrace at the University Hospital at the University of Washington in Seattle. Another shadow garden as a place of peace for patients, it was dismantled when the hospital expanded. Another was a garden of senses for the blind in Tennessee, featuring aromatic plants. This was commissioned by a country music artist and had Braille texts in large chrome-topped bolts embedded in the cast cement, which was moulded over wire armatures.

Poltroon Press

In 2005, Butler was asked to submit a biography for a show entitled "Women in the Arts"; she wrote:

After a conventional education reading History at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, I switched course, educated myself as a book designer and calligrapher, taking the last letterpress class offered at Oakland’s Laney Trade School and studying with the calligrapher Arne Wolf. I continued to hang around academies, eventually becoming a Professor in the Department of Environmental Design at the University of California, at Berkeley, then at Davis. I won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, was a visiting artist at various institutions, the Art Institute of Chicago, or the Jan Van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, and my work was collected by museums. I won commissions for public art projects and I wrote articles for design journals and book arts publications. But my main creative impulse has always been the exploration of the margins of commercial production, outside academic institutions or the art world, leaving a field as it became assimilated.

My mother taught me to sew and I began by sewing garments for sale, as an early practitioner of “Art for Wearing.” I opened a fabric printing workshop, Goodstuffs Handprinted Fabrics in 1969 to enhance my fashion production but instead produced running yardage, wall-hangings and then fabric sculpture projects. I set up Poltroon Press in 1975 with Alastair Johnston. At first I combined books and fabric projects, including making a series of garments as “reading environments.” But I closed Goodstuffs in 1979, and concentrated on producing books, posters, and ephemera at Poltroon Press for another decade. While Poltroon Press is still ongoing, I have gone on myself, first working on various public art sculptural projects for hospitals or colleges, and now working on a large mosaic-covered project on my farm in South Western France.Confracti Mundi Rudera

In the past I struggled to assert the importance of mental image-making as an equal to language in the cognitive process, attacking logocentrism for stunting the brain as thalidomide stunted the bodies of unborn babies. But now, confronted with the Graphic Novel, of say Art Spieglemann or Jimmy Corrigan, I differentiate my own two-streamed approach to combining text and image from this essentially cinematic form, feeling that the excellence of the drawing, and especially of the editing in a Graphic Novel substitutes the artist's world for the visual experiences of the reader and lessens the impact of images inspired by the language used.

Minnesota Center for Book Arts

Butler was the first visiting lecturer at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and "spoke of book arts in terms of re-defining tradition," challenging the center to adopt a more forward-thinking mission.

Selected solo and group exhibitions

1981

Diagrams of Natural Energy, Meyer Breier Weiss, San Francisco

New Dryads (Are Ready for Your Call), Piater Brattinga Gallery, Amsterdam

International Artists' Books Show, Art Institute of Chicago

1979

Art for Wearing, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

1978

American Illustration: 1800 to the Present, Oakland Art Museum

1977

The Object as Poet, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

1976

California Design II, Pasadena Art Museum

1975

Images of an Era—The American Poster 1945–75, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

1974

Clothing to be Seen, Museum of Contemporary Craft

1973

Anatomy in Fabric, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The Fabric of Pop, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

1972

Block Brush and Stencil, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Selected permanent collections

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The British Museum, London

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Appointment as visiting artist

The Womens Center, Los Angeles 1977, 78, 79, 80

Banff Center for the Arts 1980

Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester New York 1983

Art Institute of Chicago, 1986 and 1987

Minnesota Center for Book Arts, 1988 and 1989

Washington D.C. Center for the Book 1992

Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, The Netherlands 1994, 1995, 1996

Conference speaker

University of Nebraska: Art of the Book: Impact of Printed Ephemera on Book Design 1981

University of Quebec: Printing Press as an Image-making Tool 1981

Columbia University: Fine Press Conference, Panel on Typography 1982

College Art Association, Washington D.C.: The Look of Heteroglossia 1991

Collections

Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The British Library, London, England

The J.P. Getty Museum, Los Angeles, USA

Bayer Collection, Munich Germany

Museum of the Book, Den Haag, The Netherlands

Grants

National Endowment for the Arts: Poltroon Press 1975, 1977, 1980 and Services to the Field, 1979

Poltroon Press Books

[Design, Illustration, Printing, or Writing by FCB]

Confracti Mundi Rudera. Illustrations 1976

Logbook by Tom Raworth. Design and Illustrations 1977

Instead of an Animal by Leslie Scalapino. Design and Illustrations 1978

The Diamond Noodle by Philip Whalen. Illustrations 1980

New Dryads (are Ready for your Call) by Frances Butler 1980

Occult Psychogenic Misfeasance by Frances Butler 1981

Career Options by Frances Butler 1985

Western Excess by Frances Butler 1995

Selected Articles on printing and the graphic arts

Pochoir Illustration. Fine Print. July 1978

The Deceptively Simple Art of Pochoir. Print News, 1981

A Short List of Books about Ornament. Fine Print, April 1982

Real Time and Bookworks. California Bookworks Catalog. Otis Parsons Institute, 1984

The Strip: Comics from the framed to the unframed body. The Ampersand, 1987

Reading Outside the Grid: Designers and Society. Society for Typographic Arts, 1989

Pochoir, a Late 20th Century Revisit. Bookways, October 1992

New Demotic Typography: The search for new indices. Visible Language, 1995