Brian Butler’s quest began with the Saugusaurus, a 12-foot-tall fiberglass T. rex looming over a miniature golf course in Saugus.
In 2006, while he was studying printmaking at the Mass. College of Art and Design, vandals snapped the dinosaur statue at its ankles and knocked it to the ground.
“Seeing it on its side made me realize how vulnerable silly roadside attractions and novelties like that actually are,” Butler says. “In my mind, that thing was a pillar of modern society. It was an institution.”
That’s when Butler’s in-depth study of mini-golf began. In 2007, he played every mini-golf course in Massachusetts (there were 84) and visited five defunct ones, then built a popup mini-golf course in one of the school’s galleries as his thesis.
Butler works as an illustrator. He’s painted murals for Target and Shake Shack; he’s drawn promotional material for Red Bull and designed tour merchandise for bands including Wu-Tang Clan, the Police, and Dropkick Murphys. A lot of that merchandise started as single-page sketches of performances.
Growing up in Marshfield, Butler came to Cape Cod every Saturday to visit his grandparents, who lived in Hyannis. A mini-golf course in Yarmouth figures prominently in his memories. But he says he didn’t “get adopted into the community” until 2022, when he participated in a residency at Rugosa Gallery in Eastham. There, he mounted a show that paid homage to the now-closed institutions that shaped his childhood. He drew the bear statue that once stood outside Yarmouth’s ZooQuarium and a shout-out to Salty’s, a restaurant that, he says, “had the best logo: a mermaid riding a lobster.”
People in Eastham know some of Butler’s work: he painted the pig and hippo on the Jersey barriers at the old T-Time property. Those were inspired by similar graphics that were on view when the place was a driving range with an arcade. The driving range was sold to Stop & Shop in 2013, then to the town in 2019.
A couple of years ago, Butler found himself sketching the crowd at the Oldtimers Longboard Classic, the annual surfing contest at White Crest Beach in Wellfleet, in the same way he often sketches concerts: using a felt-tipped pen to capture as many people as possible on the page. He doesn’t surf — he can hardly swim, he says — but he was attracted to the concert-like atmosphere on the beach that day. There was hardly any swell when he took out his notebook, he says, so the longboarders were in the throes of synchronized paddling and “coming up with creative ways to be on a longboard.”
The Oldtimers asked Butler to come back in 2024 to sketch again. This year he’s issued an open invitation for people to display beach towels they’ve transformed into works of art.
He pictures it this way: “The best view of the towel show is from above, and luckily, White Crest has cliffs. Right off the bat you can just kind of look over the edge of the cliff and catch the whole vibe. Then, if you want, you can come down and get the details.”
Butler did something similar in Miami during last year’s Art Basel. Some of his favorite installments from that one were a three-dimensional martini glass made of towels, an Astroturf “towel” with a hole cut to make a putt-putt green, and a sculpture of a spray-tanned “booty” wearing a bikini bottom.
To kick off the show, Butler held a pop-up beach towel decorating session on July 24 at the Wild Water Collective in Orleans. He helped passersby carve rubber stamps for printmaking on blank towels; he spray-painted a giant lobster on his own.
Butler is a serial organizer of playful, spontaneous community art, it turns out. He’s modest about it. “I hesitate to call myself a mastermind or anything like that,” he says. At his Everybody Draws Everybody gatherings, which he runs “nomadically” as he travels around, 15 to 20 strangers will sign up to draw each other, taking only three minutes per person.
“It’s a lightly traumatic, silly way of meeting people,” he says. “The art of play,” is the goal. He’s in it to get people to “relinquish expectations.”
Two decades after the Saugasaurus was toppled, Butler still hasn’t lost his devotion to such symbols of summertime. “Mini golf, bowling, all these summer activities are just getting replaced by screen time,” he says. “Thinking existentially, these things aren’t going to be here forever.”
Maybe the people who stopped by Wild Water last Thursday didn’t plan to decorate a beach towel with a school of stamped fish they had cut from a block of rubber, he says, “but here we are.”
Surfside Art
The event: Beach Towel Art Show at the Oldtimers Longboard Classic
The time: Sunday, Aug. 24, 5 p.m.
The place: White Crest Beach, Wellfleet
The cost: Free
