Collection Statement

The Butterfly Man is a five piece capsule collection that was displayed at the Alice Austin House, a historic museum in Staten Island. The collection pays homage to my surrogate grandmother. She was my next door neighbor growing up, and since I never had the opportunity to know my grandparents, she was the closest semblance to one I ever had. For the purpose of protecting her identity since she is still alive, I will refer to this beautiful, wonderful woman as Doris.

 

Doris married her high school sweetheart and soon fell pregnant with three babies one after the other. She always dreamed of going to college and becoming a nurse, but lacked the time and resources to do so. “Back in the day” it was typical for male spouses to take their anger, stress, and frustrations out on their significant others through physical force. 

 

It started as insults on how she looked, talked, dressed, how she walked funny. And how her love of poetry and her obsession and love of science and human anatomy of was just “plain weird”. Her children were old enough to be in grade school during this time, kindergarten, first grade, and third grade. She worked as a secretary at the school.

 

She met The Butterfly Man one afternoon, he was a new biology teacher who had parked his car in front of the school. He kept coming in and out of the lobby loading in boxes and boxes of stuff. Doris arose from her desk and decided to offer her help to the man. She grabbed one of the boxes by the door and asked him “Is this a blue morpho butterfly?” This began a decade long friendship filled of poetry exchanges, letters, and a shared love of biology.

 

Doris never left her husband, and although the relationship did turn to physical violence for a brief period of time - she found comfort in her friendship with The Butterfly Man. He nurtured the parts of her that she thought she would have to hide away, and nurtured the parts of him that his parents feared of him. They often would ask him, “are you a queer?” Or “why do you only have friends who are women? Why can’t you seem to find a wife?”

 

They found one another at the precise moment when they needed comfort and comradery. Doris never considered herself to be a survivor, but to be an educator. She and her husband entered into couple’s counseling on the advice of her new found friend. She is fortunate that her husband was open minded enough to agree. And even more fortunate that they went on to raise their two daughters to never accept if any partner laid a hand on them.

 

The first piece of the collection represents the caterpillar phase of the hurt and shame we often feel as the individual experiencing domestic violence. The feeling of not wanting anyone to see of to know, of wanting to hide what you are experiencing. 

 

The second piece shows the cocooning phase, the moment of wanting to give up. The third piece shows a reaching out for help, the butterflies represent all others who are in recovery for domestic violence and have shared their stories to help others.

 

The fourth piece represents the feeling of empowerment from hearing the stories of recovery and a desire to become an advocate. And the final piece is that of the butterfly, a blank slate, the advocate forging their own path so others can run.