Shelley Buonaiuto is an artist living and working in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Her delightful sculptures capture the warmth and joy of her subjects. From the beginning of her artistic career with her husband Michael, Shelley felt that to sculpt humans she must represent all our diversity and her work reflects her concern for social justice and racial equity. For Shelley – and the viewer, the grin, the laugh, and the sound from these figures are all expressions of the joy of living. This is why her sculptures are in major collections and households around the country. More of her work can be found at Zarks Gallery in Eureka Springs, Arkansas and at her website.

AAS: Shelley, I would first like offer my condolences on the recent death of your husband, Michael. I know he was also a creative partner.

SB: Thank you. Michael died of Covid 19 and Alzheimer’s on June 29th, of 2020. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s soon after we moved here in 2007 and accepted the diagnosis with grace and even some relief. It had been coming on and terrifying him for years. Now he no longer had to deny it. I was able to care for him until 2016, when we placed him in a nursing home and visited regularly. While he was still here, he continued to work in the pottery for a long time, making loose little joyous figures, which we fired and sold at a craft fair to benefit the Alzheimer’s association. One of my favorite pieces I called Inward Skies. It was of a woman lovingly holding her husband in her arms, as he was sort of sliding away from her. The bench under him blew up in the kiln, but enough was left so the piece was intact. I loved this. It fit the nature of the narrative. I glued the fragments onto a base under them. I didn’t know at the time that Michael had Alzheimer’s. I imagine I was intuiting it. My work often showed that the unconscious knew things that I was not yet aware of. This also continually presented itself as pieces developed in ways that were surprising to me.

Michael and I met in 1967. I was sitting alone reading Giles Goat Boy in a booth at the student Union at UMass, when this cute guy with an Italian Afro, who I’d noticed the week before and thought, oh, he’s too cute, he’d have no interest in me, sat down and asked if I could spell his name…Buonaiuto…I got close..left out the u. We took off to a Mt Holyoke coffee shop and a photographer there took our photo and put it in the paper the next day. Must have intuited destiny happening.
We were both in art school, and after some ups and downs ended up in Berkeley, and then northern California, joined a Gurdjieff group, and then moved to New York in 1971 to be with the main group, Chardavogne Barn. There was a pottery there that I started to work at and began to build a line of clay figures. Michael joined me in the pottery in 1975.

AAS: You have lived in some wonderful places all around the country and South America. How did you end up in Fayetteville?

SB: Yes, we bounced all over. I grew up in Florida and was at UMass as an exchange student from USF. After California and 12 years in NY we traveled in South America with our two children for 7 months and then settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico for 23 years. When our son married the lovely Arkansas girl he’d met at a craft fair he did with Michael and they had a baby, we knew we had to be there for our grandson, so we bought a place in Fayetteville. The one criterion was there had to be a creek. New Mexicans really value water.

AAS: I first saw your work at the Little Rock Riverfront Park Vogel Schwartz Sculpture Garden. Your bronze, Sun, was one of the first pieces acquired for the park. It is so lovely there out in the sun!

SB: Sun is part of a series of three I called Alternative Energies. I also did Wind and Wave. I love Black gospel music, the rhythm, joy, depth, the thrilling emotionality of it. I wanted to capture that in an image of the Sun. The piece was selected because it won a juror’s award at the River Market Art Show in Little Rock that year (2009).

AAS: When you were living in Santa Fe, you did a wonderful bronze titled Dialogue of two women, Jetter Johnson and Martha Chabin, which is in the rotunda of the New Mexico State Capitol. Would you talk about that piece? It is very special.

SB: Martha was a friend of mine, a brilliant and eccentric liberal journalist who had been essentially thrown out of Kansas during the McCarthy era. Michael and I lived 5 minutes from the New Mexico Capitol, and were often there at protests or to visit legislators. I kept looking at the busts of the 19th century war heroes in the rotunda and thinking I could do that, but of women of peace. Martha agreed to model, and I met Jetter at the Santa Fe NAACP meeting. Her husband had to vet me before he agreed she could model. When the two women got together for a photo session, Martha went into full journalist mode and got Jetter’s life story. The piece took me 5 years off and on. I started it and just didn’t know how to finish it, so put it away for four of those years. When I finally pulled it together, I was working with a dialogue group, and I captured the dialogue that Martha and Jetter engaged in. When the Capitol chose the sculpture to display, I asked them to place it across from the war heroes and they did. Martha captioned her name as “for all the Marthas who work for peace.“

AAS: I have to say, to me, a common theme of your work is that joy and hope can and should be shared by anyone, even in adversity, if they just open up an allow it to happen.

 SB: I’m so glad you see this. The work is not only about joy, but about presence, this presence that is there through the most difficult of times, that can be tapped into. Many people who bought my work spoke about the challenges they’d been through. I made 7 or 8 sculptures of mastectomies, each with a different feeling. The first sculpture had the friend comforting the woman who’d undergone the surgery, but after speaking with so many women at my booth, in the last one the one who had lost her breast was comforting her friend.
Racism is a painful disease of our society. I did what I could in my sculpture, Bob and Maria, to heal it. This particular piece is based on an interracial couple I’d met at an NAACP meeting in Santa Fe.

AAS: You and Michael were creating resin and ceramic figures before you started with bronze? Let’s talk about some of those. Pepe and Gladys are just the most wonderful characters! 

SB: No, we made some bronzes before we started the resin line. Pepe and Gladys are the pair most about us. Michael modeled for Pepe, and Pepe is what he called his French grandfather. I padded myself out in pillows and took photos of the pose for it, though it’s not my face. I could model for her now without pillows! We started resins for financial reasons. People responded to our work, but many couldn’t afford it, so we created a line of resins that would be more affordable. It worked! We made money. It’s an involved process. At first a factory in Albuquerque produced them. We became good friends with the mold maker and painter, and they taught us how to mold and paint them. But we now have them cast overseas and I hand paint every one of them.

AAS: Another piece I love is Max and Harvey. Would you talk about that piece?

SB: Max and Harvey was a commission by a gallery owner, Roy Sumner of Sumner and Dene in Albuquerque, who sold our work, for his private collection. It’s simple, just a loving gay couple. I liked the names.  It is made of a combination of porcelain and stoneware, as most of my clay pieces were at the time, and fired to cone 10, very high fire, in a gas reduction kiln. Michael had built the kiln and did all of our firing. We moved it from New York to Santa Fe, and rebuilt it again 2 more times as we moved our studio to different places in Santa Fe.
When I start a piece, I have a rough idea what I’m going to do, but the sculpture as it develops begins to direct the aesthetic, so you are shown what to do next to make it work. Complicated pieces almost always fall apart in the middle of the process, you expect it to be an utter failure, then you prop it up and continue and see how to make it work. And it usually does. Sometimes pieces blow up in the kiln. I have lost entire kiln loads after working for weeks or months on them.
I am currently working on a commission for a bronze, for a customer who has bought from me over the years. The theme is her idea, a couple chiseling each other out of stone. I asked her, are you sure? Chiseling? What about smoothing out of clay? She said no, relationships aren’t easy. So chiseling it is. It’s working, too.

AAS: You have created some exquisite oil lamps. Would you talk about those and what inspired you to start making them?

SB: When I first started working in the pottery at Chardavogne Barn I made oil lamps, very simple ones. My sculpture is representational and when I had more skill I wanted to try sculpting in a more stylized and abstract manner. Making oil lamps was so much fun because I never knew how the lamp would end up. The clay directed me and the final piece was always a surprise. I thought of it not really as a functional piece, but of the fire as part of the sculpture.

AAS: Then, there is Dancer. Looking at it reminds me of my grandmother – and of course the phrase ‘dance like no one is watching’, which maybe is the way you live your life?  

SB: I LOVE to dance, and I love to dance when no one is watching, or they can watch and I ask them to join in! So, I liked sculpting dancers and trying to capture that sense of abandon. I had a lot of failures, but some of them worked really well. This is a good one.

AAS: I know you have done some teaching and worked with kids in Guatemala. Is working with kids something you’ve always wanted to do?

SB: I really haven’t done that much teaching. But a friend from the convent St. Scholastica in Ft. Smith asked if I’d teach at their “campamento” in Esquipulas and it was a chance to go to Guatemala, so I agreed. I’m not at all religious. We knew the sisters from the presentations a group of us from Citizens Climate Lobby made about climate change at their convent and I really liked and respected them. It was an enlightening trip. We started in Suchitoto, El Salvador, and stayed at an inn run by Sister Peg. While there, a member of the staff asked if I’d like to watch this film he wanted to show me. We went into a separate room, put it on the tv, and the images were of a massacre that had occurred there during the civil war, murdered children lying in the street. To my shame, I couldn’t watch the whole thing. He was understanding. Sister Peg, on our last day there, took us to San Salvador to the church where Archbishop Romero was assassinated. I had worked with the sanctuary program in Santa Fe in the 80s and was aware of the civil wars in Central America, but this experience deepened my understanding of the trauma the people are still feeling. The school in Esquipulas was run by a Catholic monastery, and we taught art to children who were sponsored to go to this school by the sisters of St. Scholastica. We also taught for a week at a convent orphanage run by Sor Dina, a remarkable nun responsible for some 30 children and 6 novitiates. I met some beautiful, intelligent, and remarkably talented young people with hopes for their futures, but who have limited opportunities in Guatemala. I think about them often.

AAS: What is next for you, Shelley?

SB: Chickens, apparently. My current partner Mike pulled together a building for a chicken coop and we’re getting 8 little chicks or so in a couple of weeks. And we’ve been adopted by a cat, who kept appearing, so we call her Catback. She likes tuna.
I also am trying to pull together a fabrication of rusty metal parts and found objects to express our nation’s troubled history of racist exploitation. It’s hard because I’ve never worked in metal…my son has done some welding for me. Our three children, Ben, Nina and Mia are also artists. Ben works in stone, Nina in clay and painting and Mia paints and make prints. Nina and Mia are also teachers, and Ben does landscape masonry. We have three grandchildren and are so lucky to have them living nearby.