Ken Butler

Ken Butler was born in Bethesda, MD, in 1948, and currently lives in New York City. Butler studied at Colorado College, the Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence (France), and Portland State University, where he received his MFA in painting.  He is most famous for building experimental (“hybrid”) musical instruments, employing a bricolage method of using whatever is at hand. He constructed his first hybrid instrument in 1978 by combining a small hatchet, a contact microphone, and other materials, which he then played as a violin. Since then, he has constructed over 400 hybrid instruments, often from such prosaic objects as a snow shovel, hockey stick, golf club, toy handgun, or rocking-chair leg. Not only have his instruments been exhibited at major museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Stedelijk Museum, but he also performs his instruments at festivals and clubs, and has even appeared on The Tonight Show and played with the Tonight Show Band. In creating these unusual instruments, many of which are unplayable, Butler claims that they are “attempts to reveal hidden meanings and associations, momentarily creating a striking and re-animated cultural identity for common objects.”