Deborah Butterfield

Deborah Butterfield has spent five decades reinventing the horse as a subject in American sculpture, working between a farm in Bozeman, Montana, and a studio in Hawaii, where she divides her year with her husband, sculptor John Buck. Born in San Diego in 1949, she studied at the University of California, Davis, earning her BFA in 1972 and MFA in 1973. She turned to the horse as an oblique self-portrait, feeling the female figure already claimed by her mentor Manuel Neri, and the animal became her lasting subject.