One button at a time, Beau McCall makes his mark on the art world

Artist and designer Beau McCall has made his mark on the art world one button at a time. Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH Boston takes us through the first-ever retrospective covering his near-40-year career. It’s part of our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Jeffrey Brown:
Artist and designer Beau McCall has made his mark on the art world one button at a time.
Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH Boston takes us through the first ever retrospective covering his near-40-year career.
It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.
Jared Bowen:
Going all the way back to his childhood, artist and designer Beau McCall has been besotted with buttons.
Beau McCall, Artist:
My mom had a jar, a Maxwell House jar, buttons — in the basement full of buttons. So I always tell people, it was almost like me and the jar had dialogue.
Jared Bowen:
Whatever the jar said, it resonated deeply. Buttons have fastened their hold over McCall as his medium of choice.
As we find at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, he’s crafted vests, dresses, and shoes, jewelry, collage, and a bathtub.
Beau McCall:
So most of the things that I learned, I learned home in our apartment in public housing. Most of the crafts I learned, I learned at day camp, after-school programs, and three sewing stitches from my mom that I still use today. So I like to call it homegrown.
Jared Bowen:
McCall grew up in Philadelphia to parents with an innate sense of fashion and design often assembled from thrift stores, rummage sales, even the trash. It was upcycling before upcycling was a thing, he says, which was the impetus for him to see a creative bounty in buttons.
Beau McCall:
The button for me is precious. I use the buttons as a language. I use the buttons to help me tell stories within the works.
Jared Bowen:
Those stories began to have a sharper focus, he says, after a pivotal trip to Johannesburg, South Africa, where McCall’s artistic scope was vastly expanded.
Beau McCall:
I got inspired by all the young creatives that was there. I was blown away by the craftsmanship and the visions that they had as far as fashion and art.
And when I got back, I was inspired to do this piece that I titled Motherland I.
Jared Bowen:
And then there’s this, his cascading 20-pound do-rag fit for a red carpet.
Beau McCall:
And then if you look at it, it just glistens like a waterfall. So I was attracted to the way it sparkled.
(Laughter)
Beau McCall:
And then I had buttons commissioned about hair care. So there’s an Afro pick. You have the Afro comb. You have the Afro silhouette. So you have different variations of how Black folks wear their hair.
Jared Bowen:
McCall often wears his creations, but the headdress was designed for Souleo, the artist’s partner and the curator of this show.
Souleo, Curator:
It always makes you want to stand up right. It really gives you a sense of empowerment and beauty and strength and courage.
Jared Bowen:
They’re descriptors that could also apply to McCall, who moved to New York in the late 1980s. Buttons helped him banish a lifelong shyness and emerge as a designer and darling of the Harlem Institute of Fashion, all at a time, says Souleo, when McCall used his work to both bolster and document an LGBTQ community marginalized by the AIDS crisis.
He designed disco-wear and assembled collages of his friends frolicking.
Souleo:
And so you see how his friends lived through all of those different periods in their lives, and what helped them get through those challenging social circumstances was their love for each other, their friendship and their bonds.
Beth McLaughlin, Artistic Director and Chief Curator, Fuller Craft Museum: I see it as a love story between Beau and the button and material.
Jared Bowen:
Beth McLaughlin is the artistic director and chief curator of the Fuller Craft Museum and says she’s been especially drawn to McCall’s skill at elevating the otherwise humble button.
Beth McLaughlin:
And I think in contemporary craft, in particular, our whole field is based on this notion of skilled making and really taking these materials that we live with every day, that we touch every day and transforming them into works of art.
Jared Bowen:
A significant percentage of those buttons, by the way, have been entrusted to McCall over the years. While some are specially sourced, the best ones, he says, have a telltale sign of their rich history. They smell like mildew.
Beau McCall:
Most of the time, they have been sitting in somebody’s house, in somebody’s basement, in a jar somewhere, in the blue cookie tin or the old cigar box. And they have probably been around for years.
Those were buttons when people really focused on the creativity and the button itself. So that gets me excited.
Jared Bowen:
For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jared Bowen in Brockton, Massachusetts.