“Seven” is a pop-up exhibition that gives viewers a deeper look inside the Government Cheese offices, or the art, sound and publishing arm of Tay Butler’s practice. Government Cheese activates collage, paint, literature, sound, found sculpture, screenprinting and zinemaking to engage Black radical political thought, and disseminate ideas through 7 selected items to a greater audience, numbed by anti-political, identity-based, capital-driven conformity. Intimate collages are made with the covers of mainstream magazines. Zine pages are blown up to scale. Cassette and compact disc players contextualize speech and poetry. Vintage broadsides are reborn as screenprints. Cereal and processed cheese boxes become sculptural works. Government Cheese, in solidarity with the Black Arts Movement of the mid-1960s, is a response to the brand new same old.
Tay Butler is a multi-disciplinary visual artist based in Houston, TX. He received his BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston and completed his Photography MFA at the University of Arkansas. After retiring from the US Army and abandoning a middle-class engineering career to search for purpose, Tay reignited a rich obsession appreciation for Black history, visual art and the Black archive. Through collage, photography, drawing, video, sound, literature, performance and large-scale installation, Tay utilizes past histories and imagery to create new understandings of the present while imagining a brighter future.
Tay’s solo exhibitions and include A Friendly Game of Basketball, Lawndale Art Center, Houston, The Triangle, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, RE.Migrant I & II at Project Row Houses, Houston, TX and We Are Still Searching at the Louise J. Moran Fine Arts Courtyard, Houston TX. His collage murals have been installed in the historical Black community of Edgehill, TN, Rice University and McGovern Park in his hometown of Milwaukee, WI. His group exhibitions include the groundbreaking Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage at Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN, Slowed & Throwed for CAMH, Houston, TX and Terms & Conditions, for the Buffalo Soldier museum and the University Museum of TSU.
Website: www.stayclosetay.com
Instagram: @stayclosetay
This event is funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.