Meet Butch Anthony
The Artist
Butch Anthony is a contemporary, self-taught artist, maker, and collector of objects and antiques. He grew up on his family's 80-acre property in Seale, Alabama, where he lives and works today in a home he built by hand. He is the creator of the ‘Museum of Wonder, The World’s First Drive Thru Museum’.
Butch at the entrance to his ‘drive-thru’ museum
In the early 1990's Butch started creating art using various media and techniques, crafting them into one-of-a-kind-masterpieces. Throughout a career spanning decades, Butch created a specific genre of work called Intertwanglelism, (inter = to mix; twangle = a distinctive way of speaking, thinking, behaving, assessing; and ism = a theory). Butch attended Auburn University in the mid 1980's, where he studied zoology, geology, and biology. While there, he enrolled in a comparative anatomy class that he would later attribute to the use of veins and bones in his art.
‘Violets’, 2020
Intertwangled old charcoal portrait with dried violets from Butch Anthony’s garden
Butch’s work has been featured in solo, group, and juried exhibitions across the United States and in London. He has been featured on the television series American Pickers and his work in publications including The New York Times and Hyperallergic.
‘It’s Always The Right Time To Do The Wrong Thing’, 2015
Intertwangled vintage photograph with mixed media
The Museum
The Museum of Wonder is a modern-day cabinet of curiosities filled with art, artefacts, and found or gifted objects including the world’s largest gallstone and an actual footprint from Sasquatch! At the age of fourteen, Butch built a one-room log cabin that became a workshop for his many creations and eventually the first incarnation of the Museum of Wonder.
Inside Butch Anthony’s ‘Museum of Wonder’
Butch at work in his studio
As his skills developed, Butch began to build and fashion furniture, sculptures, and many other works of art and constructions. The Museum soon became too small and too popular for the log cabin to contain. In 2014, Butch built The World’s First Drive-Thru Museum out of shipping containers. It sits off U.S. HWY 431 in Seale, Alabama and exhibits a rotating display of Butch’s handcrafted designs and curiosities for the wonderment of visitors and passerby’s alike.
Starting in the 1970’s as Butch Anthony’s taxidermy shop and artefact room, the Museum of Wonder is now filled with art, antiques, and some very strange items!
You can view the Extraordinary Objects collection of originals by Butch Anthony here.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us with any questions, queries or commissions.