BUTTER Fine Art Fair 2023
BUTTER 2023 Exhibition Hall, photographed by Eric Lubrick with artworks by Andy Fear, Gary Gee, Aaron Coleman, and Shabez Jamaal.
BUTTER is a fine art fair that centers and elevates Black artists. The cultural infrastructure for artists is lacking, and the roadmap to career advancement and financial sustainability has been unclear. BUTTER aims to change this. BUTTER invites guests to see and experience contemporary art in new ways, all while advocating for the value and worth of Black artists. The fair was created by GANGGANG to test a new model for reparations in the arts, with a focus on care, authenticity, and economic justice. In just three years, BUTTER has made a bright impact on Indianapolis and beyond. By returning 100% of artwork sales back to the artists, the fair is an experiment in elevating standards across the art industry and the economic viability of being an artist.
BUTTER 2023 CURATORIAL TEAM
BRAYDEE EULISS, Director of Curatorial Affairs, BUTTER 2021 – 2023
MALINA SIMONE BACON, Curator, BUTTER 2021 – 2023
ALAN BACON, Curator, BUTTER 2021 – 2023
ALYSE TUCKER BOUNDS, Associate Curator, BUTTER 2023
KIA DAVIS, Guest Curator, BUTTER 202
GREG ROSE, Curatorial Fellow, BUTTER 2023
BUTTER is equity in action. In 2023, it deepens its commitment to equity, artist care, and building new arts infrastructures at the local level by expanding the curatorial team and establishing curated presentations for the fair’s third edition.
Braydee Euliss returns to BUTTER for her third year, now as Director of Curatorial Affairs. Malina Simone Bacon and Alan Bacon, founders of GANGGANG and BUTTER, serve as curators and Creative Directors for the fair. Euliss has expanded the 2023 curatorial team to work in alignment with GANGGANG's larger focus on artist care, artists' rights, and authorship. The team includes Indiana-based curators Alyse Tucker Bounds and Greg Rose. Bounds is the Visual Portfolio Manager for GANGGANG and serves as Associate Curator in support of special projects for the fair. Rose serves as the Curatorial Fellow, leading from their past exhibitor experiences. Kia Davis, founder of KKURATED Creative Agency, joins the team as Guest Curator and brings more than 15 years experience in the sports and entertainment licensing industry to her work with the fair and this year’s exhibiting artists.
BUTTER is a curated fair and has been from its beginnings, first centering The Eighteen Art Collective, a new Indianapolis-based initiative, for its 2021 edition. Each year, the curatorial team and, in turn, its roster of exhibiting artists evolves. Artists are invited to participate based on recommendations from a rotating, national panel of curators. In most cases, we work directly with self-represented artists one-on-one, much like a gallery would to support them and help prepare their work for exhibition and sale. The curatorial team works to reserve at least 50% of the exhibitor roster for self-represented Indiana-based artists who are presented alongside national artists as a commitment to growing the arts ecosystem in the Midwest. For many artists, BUTTER has been the catalyst to full-time art careers, relationships with new collectors, and the confidence to take risks. As a springboard for connection, visibility, and value in creative communities, we have a responsibility to extend and encourage access to BUTTER.
This year, we challenged ourselves to work with more new-to-Indianapolis artists than ever before. Geographically, 2023 artists represent more of the state of Indiana, more of the country, and more of the world than in years prior. The fair brings together the works and perspectives of artists from ten cities in Indiana; more corners of the United States including Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington DC, and Los Angeles; and the countries of Ghana and Nigeria.
Expanding our view opened opportunities for fresh conversations, unpredicted learning, and prompts to reflect and respond. Featured emerging, mid-career, and established artists share interests in personal memory, geopolitics, pop culture, recovering knowledge, gender as performance, social responsibility, cultural heritage preservation, and joy. These common threads are highlighted throughout the fair across individual artists where they resonate most with our team as essential considerations for both our community and the contemporary art world at large.
As we've come to better know and understand this year's artists, we appreciate and present them and their work under two broad, more essential connecting points. BUTTER 2023 presents the work of 50 artists, four galleries, and six curators as an act of discovery and an invitation to care.
Installation Views. Photographed by Eric Lubrick.
