PLAY/GROUND began in 2018 as a weekend-long art experience that brought together more than 30 artists, inviting them to create groundbreaking installations, performances, and experiences.
Since then, the event has grown into a 10-day public art extravaganza that displays public art installations at various locations throughout the City of Buffalo. These locations are the Buffalo Central Terminal, The Broadway Market, Matt Urban Hope Center, The Handley Room, and Canalside.
PLAY/GROUND is happening now, and its 20 unique art installations can be viewed by the public through August 15.
Kyle Butler, an assistant professor of fine arts, is once again showcasing some of his sculptural work in PLAY/GROUND. Butler’s installment, entitled Municipal Sentiment: Sod Forms, is a series of sculptural arrangements utilizing the various end spaces of the Buffalo Central Terminal. The primary components are clustered sequences of purpose-built podiums that hold up rolls of sod as if the grass is incrementally shifting its position. The podiums are surfaced with graphite and reflective tape. Additionally, chain-link fence with abstract signage swells up from the ground and weaves between the clusters of sod forms. The project mixes formal and material norms of my own art practice with select pragmatic features of the built environment.
In addition to showcasing his work in PLAY/Ground, Butler has had solo exhibitions at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, the Nina Freudenheim Gallery, the Buffalo Art Studio, and more. He has been included in exhibitions at The Albright Knox Art Gallery, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, is a 2016 Franklin Furnace Fund grant co-recipient, was part of a featured exhibition of performance art at Nuit Blanche Toronto in 2014, was in the Beyond/In Western New York exhibition in 2010. He was represented by the Nina Freudenheim Gallery until Freudenheim’s passing in 2020. He has been featured in New American Paintings (2010), and is in collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Burchfield Penney Art Center and numerous private collections. Butler co-curated the Amid/In WNY exhibition series at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (2015/16), curated and taught at Starlight Studio and Art Gallery, an art center that facilitates adults with developmental disabilities in realizing creative projects.
To view Butler’s work online, visit https://artplaygroundny.com/projects/kyle-butler-infrastrictures.
