Bev Butkow (b. Johannesburg, 1967) is a South African artist whose work transgresses the boundaries between textile art, painting, sculpture, and installation. She works experimentally across and between these genres, using weaving as a literal and figurative process that connects the material, the personal and the social.
Butkow is a latecomer to art-making, having transitioned from a successful career in finance to a full-time art practice. In 2022 she completed her Master of Fine Arts (cum laude) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits), with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and presented the outcomes of this academic engagement as a solo body of work at the Origins Centre Museum, Wits University.
Bev Butkow is a spatial-weaver and material-painter whose woven, knotted and assembled installations dissolve boundaries between material, body and space. Working with foraged and surplus materials, she honours repetition and care as radical gestures of resistance. Her materially and conceptually rigorous practice interrogates how we walk upon the earth, alone and in community. From this, process becomes a catalyst for reimagining social and spatial futures that are grounded in feminine wisdom and embodied ritual.
As 2025 Artist in Residence at the University of Johannesburg, Butkow is transforming the university’s brutalist Theatre Foyer with a woven installation to soften the institutional architecture. Her work is currently featured in the 18th International Triennial of Tapestry, Poland (2025–26), Motherhood: Paradox and Duality at the Iziko South African National Gallery (2025-2026) and Beyond Boundaries – A Collective Odyssey at Museu da Água, Lisbon. She has shown, inter alia, at the 2022 Dakar Biennale and 1-54 London, Galerie Christophe Person (Paris), Addis Fine Art (London), Museu da Agua (Lisbon), and at Wits Art Museum (Johannesburg).