Where the Wild Things Are: Animal Sculptures, Animal Lives

NIAD Virtual Gallery

organized by Roger Buttles

a small ceramic sculpture of a multi-colored bird. The bird is glazed in blue, brown, and green spots. It’s positioned like it’s swimming away: it has a long spotted tail and sits on a blue glazed ceramic square.

About the Exhibition

Maybe in our next life we’ll be born as a whale. Or maybe it will be a bat. Or maybe a swan or a giraffe. Who knows, but these animals are all around us. Maybe they’re inside us too. What animals live in you? Do they come to the surface at different times in different situations? Do you notice?

If we treat nature and animals and ourselves and others nicely and empathically, we will have a world full of happy animals and happy trees and happy plants and happy water and sky and hopefully happy people too.

We can take care of one another if we choose to. Animals take care of one another. I think people can too. People are quite good at taking care of animals they love. Maybe if we love all animals just a little more then we can love ourselves a little more and each other too. That would be nice. Then in our next life no matter what animal we are born as, we will know everyone is protecting each other. That’s a happy thought.

This is an exhibition of animals taking care of each other by artists who notice, with brilliance.

About the Organizer

Roger Buttles (b. 1977, Rockville Centre NY) received his BA in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2001 and his MFA in Painting & Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, where he was awarded The SAIC Dean Scholarship, The SAIC Rosaline Cohn Scholarship, and The SAIC Laurel Mackie Memorial Scholarship. There he worked as a teaching assistant to Candida Alvarez, Painting & Ephemera, and Riva Lehrer, Figure Drawing & Anatomy. He has had solo exhibitions at The Carl and Site Red, both in Chicago; a two-person exhibit with Ross Normandin at The Lens Gallery in Boston, and group exhibitions at The Condo Association in Chicago and McMillan, Wisconsin in an exhibition curated by Matthew Dale Fischer. He completed a residency at Alternative Worksite in Roanoke Virginia and currently works in Concord NH, where in 2023 he founded Outer Space, an artist-run gallery that exhibits both emerging and established artists in joint exhibitions. 

For more information on Roger’s curation visit: outerspacearts.xyz or @outerspacearts.xyz.

For more information on Roger’s art visit: rogerbuttles.comor@rogerbuttles.