Artist James Butler's Mississippi River Artwork Featured in Florida Exhibition

Date: 1/22/07
Contact: Marc Lebovitz

In his upcoming exhibition, artist James Butler is a travel agent, escorting the viewing public on an oil painting tour of the impressive and diverse length of the Mississippi River.

"Rapture/Rupture: Life Along the Mississippi River," showcasing the work of the distinguished professor of art at Illinois State University, will open Feb. 26 by invitation at the Anna Lamar Switzer Center for Visual Arts at Pensacola Junior College in Pensacola, Fla. Butler is the 2007 visiting guest artist at Pensacola Junior College and has pulled together some of the 18 pieces of his Mississippi River artwork done over the past two decades, plus new work completed in the last six years. The exhibition at Pensacola will feature artworks borrowed from public and private collections around the U.S.

There will be a formal patrons-only opening on March 15 and a public opening on March 16, each accompanied by a lecture from the artist. Butler also will work with Pensacola students March 14 to 16. "Rapture/Rupture" will continue through the end of March.

Anyone who saw Butler's "Views Along the Mississippi River" exhibition in Peoria and New York City in 1998 and at the Dubuque Museum of Art in 2000 will remember the scope and impact of his work. Many pieces are large - up to 11 feet wide and 5 ½ feet tall - and convey the vastness and power of the river and its links to commerce, industry, agriculture and civilization in general. Butler's more recent work reflects the effects of hurricanes Rita and Katrina on the southernmost section of the big river.

"From the beginning of my Mississippi River paintings, I set out to do work that is not just 'pretty pictures'," he said. "I'm always aware of the conflict between nature and humanity and I try to portray it in my work. I was at SIU-Edwardsville in 1973 when they had a 100-year flood, and last summer went to the Gulf Coast and saw the destruction of Rita and Katrina. After events like that, people gain a new understanding of life on a major waterway."

In Butler's paintings, the power, grace and beauty along the 2,500-mile Mississippi is juxtaposed with the encroaching civilization, the most damaging being pollution and oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Butler said the Pensacola exhibition will be in a linear progression, meaning in north to south order, from its source in Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota to La Crosse, Wis., to Dubuque, Iowa, to Hannibal, Mo., to Grafton, Ill., to Vicksburg, Miss., to Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

In dedicating the last 25 years to painting Mississippi River scenes, Butler joins a prestigious list of such 19th-century landscape artists as Henry Lewis and Frederick Church, who focused on the beauty, history and influence of the river.

"I meant for these paintings to be an homage to 19th century panoramic painting," Butler said. "In addition to thinking about the river and our relationship with it, I'm hoping that people who see the body of work also think about the paintings' relationship to other landscape paintings of earlier times."