Ken Butler

Biography

Ken Butler spent part of his early childhood in The Hague and Paris before his family settled in Portland, Oregon. He studied viola as a boy, took a studio art degree at Colorado College in 1970 with a year of painting in Aix-en-Provence, and earned an MFA in painting at Portland State University in 1977.

The turn in his work came in 1978, when he realized an axe could be strung and played like a violin. That Axe Violin was the first of more than 400 hybrid instruments and sculptures, assembled from tools, sporting goods and household objects and amplified with contact microphones. Butler describes his approach as bricolage, using whatever is at hand, and says the sound grows out of a poetic, sculptural relationship with the objects.

He moved to New York in 1988 and has worked from a loft on the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border since. His instruments and installations have been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Mass MoCA, the Stedelijk Museum and the State Hermitage, and in the Prada Foundation's Art or Sound during the 2014 Venice Biennale. He has performed with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson and Butch Morris, released Voices of Anxious Objects on Zorn's Tzadik label, played on The Tonight Show, and won the 2016 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition. At Holland Tunnel Newburgh he performed Voices of Anxious Objects in 2018 and 2023, had the solo show Hybrid Visions in 2019, and closed Reclamation in 2025.

Practice. Hybrid string and percussion instruments assembled from found objects and tools, amplified with contact microphones and played in performances that blend Middle Eastern, Indian, flamenco and Roma modes with jazz, rock, funk and blues; also installation, collage, photography and film.