Frances Marie Clark Butler (28 November 1940 – 23 September 2024) was a faculty member in the (now-defunct) Design Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and later at the University of California, Davis; she was also a textile artist, a clothing, book, and garden designer, and co-founder of Goodstuffs, a textile-printing company.
Early life and education
Butler was born in Webster Groves, Missouri. She claimed (in jest) descent from a treasurer of the Confederacy. Her father, Robert Denholme Clark, was a petrochemist, who relocated to Berkeley, California, where Frances attended Willard Junior High. The family lived in a ranch-style house in the forested hills above the Claremont Hotel.
When her parents later relocated to Tehran, Frances and her younger brother, William, attended the American School in Beirut while their parents were in Iran.
Back in Berkeley, she finished high school, and received an honors degree in History from University of California, Berkeley in 1961. Frances then attended Stanford University, where she earned her masters in History as a Woodrow Wilson fellow (summa cum laude). She would ride a Vespa across the San Francisco Bay Bridge to get there. The old western span of the bridge had expansion breaks every 50 feet, through which a strong gust of wind blew.
Marriage and career She married Jonathan Butler, a Romance philologist and polymath, and with a travel grant they lived in Sardinia for a year, where he wrote a dictionary of Sardinian. Escaping cold weather, they made trips to London, Heidelberg, and Florence.
After receiving an M.A. in Design in 1965, Frances began teaching in the Design Department at Berkeley. She influenced David Lance Goines, loaning him the book on Weimar-era posters on which he based his style. The Design Department was the center for the anti-Vietnam War protest movement, and many protest posters and banners were created in the college. It was eventually closed, popularly thought to be at the orders of Governor Reagan, but insiders say it was the college administrators who did not care for design. During this time, in the late sixties, Frances created posters and graphic design on commission and sewed a series of two dozen or more dresses and coats.
After the closure of the Department of Design, she took a teaching position at University of California, Davis, where her husband taught Italian, but they bought a house and lived in Berkeley. They started a textile printing company, Goodstuffs, in Emeryville in 1969 to manufacture screen-printed running yardage after her designs, which sold well, with her husband as manager.
The great tragedy of her life was a car accident on New Year's Day 1974, when a drunk ran into their Volkswagen Beetle: Jonathan was killed and Frances was in a coma for a month. Then she was in rehabilitation learning to walk again.
A year later, in April 1975, Berkeley Library School professor Roger Levenson suggested she take over teaching his class at The Bancroft Library, "Printing on the Handpress." She went to Arif Press in Berkeley, where she met Alastair Johnston who helped her with typesetting and printing. She invited him to be her teaching assistant, and this led to the founding of Poltroon Press.
She wrote a doctoral thesis on American designer Will Bradley, which she submitted to the Library School at Berkeley, but she was told by the dean, Robert Harlan, she couldn't be a Berkeley student at the same time as she was a professor at another campus. She then started over and wrote a new dissertation on the cosmology of Portuguese immigrant gardens in California (this was inspired by her friendship with architectural historian John Beach), which she submitted to the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley. During this time, the mid-1980s, she gave a course of guest lectures at Berkeley which were well-attended. Her lectures covered everything from Persian textiles, to cosmologies in garden design, to her passion for primitive and folk art. When she was defending her thesis, one committee member said, "We should be getting a degree from you!"
She wrote for many journals, including Fine Print and Visible Language. The publisher of Design Book Review, John Parman wrote, "Frances was an early and wonderful contributor to Design Book Review, the author of a number of memorable essay-reviews that set the tone for much that followed. It was remarkably generous and of course I learned a huge amount about the history of design."
A former student, Betty Ho, who studied graphic design at UC Davis wrote, "She was one of the more interesting and vibrant professors at Davis. I took an intro to design class with her my freshman year and dropped my last quarter of chemistry to major in environmental design. She took us on field trips to Mark Bullwinkle's yard sculptures, her shadow garden and to some printing presses. I took a typography class from her and I remember her slideshow of masculine ads (sans serif type) and feminine ads (cursive type). She was super knowledgeable and I learned a lot from her."
Around 1990 Butler was offered early retirement from UC Davis where she was chair of the Design Program in the Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. She decided to look for property in the country and found a farm in the Capay Valley, in California, but groundwater tests showed high levels of DDT. She then turned her attention to France and toured the south but found it over-priced and over-populated. On her return north she visited a friend in the Dordogne who knew of a farm for sale that suited her well. She spent over 30 years there, with cats, dogs, and two donkeys, as well as becoming quite a local legend, first for her American ways (accidentally serving horse meat at a barbecue picnic), then as she decorated her buildings with colored plaster and mosaics, telling the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and curious neighbors became admirers.
Textile art
Frances Butler began making clothes in the 1960s. She made several dozen unique dresses in a collage technique with pieces of fabric from a large collection, both purchased and inherited from her mother who had made clothes for her as a child. http://www.poltroonpress.com/engineered-dresses-by-frances-c-butler/
She designed & printed posters for a film society in Berkeley, and worked on other design commissions.
She created two "Pillow books" in silkscreen. The first "Peach Skin Preface" (1970), is a story of the birth of twins as a parody of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, the second "as a companion to fluff-up the pillow, was called 'BananaMan in Switzerland' and was, of all things, a critique of the then dominant style of grid-system Helvetica-based Swiss graphic design. I mocked this style with a dog shaped biscuit eating a bowl-full of Swiss-style Swiss cheese."
In 1971 Butler had the idea of designing running yardage to replicate some of her visual ideas so the garments wouldn't have to be pieced together, but could be made from fabric of her own design. With her husband, she established Goodstuffs Handprinted Fabrics in Emeryville, California.
Goodstuffs was set up in a block-long loft that had three long screen-printing tables, 5 feet wide and about 200 feet long, that were covered in waxed canvas. At one end was attached a bolt of heavy-duty white cotton which could be unrolled and stretched the entire length of the table and held down by the wax. A metal rail along one side had adjustable stops attached to it that would serve as guides for registering multiple silkscreens. These screens were on varnished waterproof wooden stretchers that were 6 to 8 feet long and four feet wide. Based on designs cut in rubylith film by Butler, and then exposed with a carbon-arc lamp and washed out in a walk-in shower, the screens were complex and could be registered very closely, allowing for far more detail than seen in contemporary fabric art such as Marimekko of Finland, which tended to have simple non-overlapping shapes.
In the book 5000 Years of Textiles, edited by Jennifer Harris (British Museum Press & the Victoria & Albert Museum, 1993), Chapter 9 focuses on Colonial North America. This brief overview reports (p. 262), "By the mid-1930s California's distinct style had aroused national interest, and its burgeoning clothing industry, soon to be second only to New York’s, helped to support small enterprises such as California Handprints … and in the 1960s and 70s Frances Butler’s Goodstuffs, as well as larger firms."
The caption to Butler’s "Worried Man" reads, "The vitality of post-World War II American art has also contributed to a unique style, 'Worried Man,' (1974) was designed by Frances Butler as a two-layered calendar and printed on cotton by Goodstuffs Handprinted Fabrics, her screen-printing firm, which operated in Emeryville, California between 1972 and 1979. A graphic artist, Butler began printing on cloth in the late 1960s, and was influential in creating the taste for more sophisticated visual imagery which superseded fabric designs in the pop art idiom."
Butler made her own inks with procion dye and also sold ink in bulk through Dharma Trading Company in Berkeley. The ink was forced through the screen with squeegees, operated by two people on opposite sides who then moved the screen to the next stop on the table. The work was done quickly to ensure close registration before the drying ink caused the fabric to pull and shrink. After printing, the screens, which were large and ungainly, were washed out and stored, while the fabric was allowed to set for an hour, then pulled off the table and "flown" on rods suspended from wires to dry overnight. Several hundred yards were produced daily, but there was a lot of spoilage (especially in yardage with four or more screens, or large solid areas of color), some of which was sold in an annual "Goodstuffs badstuffs" sale on the premises.
Butler taught Graphic Design at U.C. Davis in the Department of Environmental Design but her colleagues included a number of major textile artists, Katherine Westphal (a quilter, 1919–2018), Jo Ann Stabb (textile scholar, 1942-2022), Barbara Shawcross (famed as a non-loom textile artist, 1930-2021), and Gyöngy Laky (b. 1944, a sculptor, who ran Fiberworks, Center for the Textile Arts, in Berkeley). Frances Butler made a number of soft sculptures which were exhibited in traditional art venues.
These included (among others) a series of table-cloths, ranging from "Excess," a 30-foot square tablecloth for a 4 foot table, or a "Knotted Table Cloth"; table shaped stuffed pieces, each 8 feet long, knotted and stacked on a wheeled support board, with a variant, "Stuffed Shirts", which were printed and stacked shirt images on a rolling board, and "Collapsed Tea Tables": one with the design of a water-filled grid running down and off the tablecloth, another with a caption taken from a commentator on her work "The tablecloths are textured, the walls are textured, even the people are textured: there's no place to rest your eyes. No shit!"
Colleagues from the textile world remembered her in an online video, posted by Julie Anixter of Fiberworks/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msdw1A9Mzfw
By the mid-1970s she had a line of wall hangings and aprons that were sold in craft fairs as well as by salesmen (the latter were popular in stores like Gene Opton's The Kitchen in Berkeley). She explained in a letter to a museum curator: "The twenty or more 'wall hangings' I designed and printed, were sold to be stretched onto frames and used as interior decoration. I devised this scheme to keep my five employees hired, and sold stretched sets to hotels and banks etc. and the fabric to a few local stores (San Francisco Bay Area), and a New York store which then sold the designs world wide."