Deborah Butterfield

Deborah Butterfield received her graduate degree from University of California at Davis, studying with William T. Wiley, Robert Arneson, and Roy De Forest. She settled in Bozeman, Montana and taught at Montana State University from 1977 to 1986. Butterfield began creating sculptures of horses in the 1970s and has continued to explore that same subject throughout her career. She experiments with a variety of media—plaster, mud, bronze, and scrap metal—and compositions for the animal. Butterfield's intimate knowledge of the animal comes from her day-to-day interactions with horses on her ranch in Montana, and she masterfully captures the grace and demeanor of these gentle creatures.