Beau McCall grew up in Philadelphia. He loved crafts—and in the mid-80s, he left home for Harlem, wanting to do something creative but not quite sure what.
He found it when a friend took him to a show at the Harlem Institute of Fashion. McCall loved it and decided his work would be in the show the next year. His friend laughed.
But the following year, McCall brought denim pieces he’d embellished with buttons to show the institute’s faculty. “I just kept pulling all these little button trinkets out the bag and each and every one, he said, ‘Oh, I like this. I like this. Do you have more?’” McCall recounts at the Museum of Craft and Design, where Beau McCall: Buttons On!, runs through September 14th.
“He asked me if I wanted to participate, and of course, I said yes. I started that weekend and went on [to do it] maybe 10 years. I found my tribe.”
Left to right_ Beau McCall, Button Sneakers_Sunny, 2022; Button Sneakers_ All Sports, 2022; Button Sneakers_ Moonwalk, 2018(Will Howcroft)
The retrospective, organized by the Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts and curated by McCall’s partner, Souleo, is the artist’s first exhibition on the West Coast. But McCall, dubbed the “Button Man” by the magazine American Craft, has been making art for nearly four decades, with his work finding its way into collections at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum—not to mention Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors Residence, a supportive community for unhoused LGBTQ+ youth, and the private collections of Blondie’s Debbie Harry and artist Jeffrey Gibson.
As a kid, McCall was fascinated by his mother’s Maxwell jar of buttons. The first thing he made was a sweater embellished with buttons (which is in the show), and once his mother saw his interest, she went out to thrift stores to buy him bags of them.
McCall made beaded necklaces and tried weaving; his mother bought him books and took him to classes. He remembers one macrame workshop he went to when he was about 12.
“I go downstairs, and I'm thinking, ‘It’s going to be all these kids down there,’ but there were all these senior ladies,” he laughs. “I was this little boy in a room with maybe 10, 15 ladies. My mom had bought me this macrame book and I learned some of the knots from the book, so I was down there teaching the ladies how to macrame.”
Beau McCall, darkmuskoilegyptiancrystals&floridawater_ redpotionno.1, 2014(Will Howcroft)
Along with his parents, a high school art teacher—a snazzy dresser who reminded McCall of Mary Tyler Moore—saw his talent. He told her he liked working with his hands, not with pencils and crayons, and she let him do his own thing. The rug sculpture he made in her class won a prize in an art contest sponsored by the now-defunct department store Gimbels.
“I came in third place of the whole entire city,” McCall remembers. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ I was satisfied with being in third place because there are 100 or so high schools in Philadelphia.”
Along with jackets and sneakers and vests transformed into art in Beau McCall: Buttons On!, the exhibition has a life-sized Kool-Aid Man made of buttons, and a button-covered cast-iron bathtub. There’s also a sound piece (of buttons, of course) and prints from his art book, Rewind: Memories on Repeat.
Showing me around the exhibition, Souleo says that McCall doesn’t see a hierarchy between art and craft. “For Beau, it’s all art. It's all using the buttons as a tool of communication and language.”
He’s doing something that’s been done for centuries, Souleo continues. “Marcel Duchamp gets all the credit for using found objects. But you look back at ancient civilizations in Africa, they were using found materials to create art, before Dadaism. Beau, with the button, really harkens back to that time, especially in Africa, when they were using found objects like buttons and nails to create masks and so forth.”
One of the works in "Beau McCall: Buttons On!'(Courtesy of @furthertriennial)
The book in the exhibition—Rewind: Memories on Repeat—was made to honor McCall’s friends, who he met when they were all coming to terms with their sexuality. It was right at the end of disco, when punk was coming in, and he remembers going to see the Plasmatics.
“When [they] finally came on stage, Wendy had this blonde mohawk, and she only had pasties on and a pair of tights. Right before they went on stage, somebody had a machine gun and shot all the lights off. We were ducking and dodging. We didn't know it was a part of their show,” McCall says. “They had a coffin on stage, and one of the guys had a French maid’s outfit on. It was so bizarre, but we had so much fun. From there, we decided that we were going to create our own group.”
They did, writing their own songs and performing. But in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, many of those friends started to die, some from AIDS. McCall slipped into a depression. When someone from Rutgers University approached him to do an artist book, he started to think about an album he had from that period.
“I would revisit that album often, and sometimes it made me laugh and sometimes it made me cry, but in all of that, it was positive energy,” McCall says. “So, I decided to base the book on the friends that I lost… I wanted to leave our footprints behind, to say that we were here and we actually did something.”
// Beau McCall: Buttons On! is at the Museum of Craft and Design through September 14; 2569 3rd St. (Dogpatch), sfmcd.org
