The African American Craft Initiative was designed to expand the visibility of African American artisans and ensure equitable access to resources. As part of this effort, Folklife Magazine highlights artisans in the AACI network.

As a child, Beau McCall frequently talked to his family’s button jar.

The bright red Maxwell House coffee tin sat beneath the stairs of his South Philly home and was filled with all types of buttons. He would sometimes sit there for hours, taking the buttons out, flipping them over, hitting them together for the sounds they made, and imagining what he could create with them.

Many children recall a similar experience, albeit with a Royal Dansk cookie tin. The tissue-laced biscuits on the lid looked so exciting, but open it up and find sewing supplies—hundreds of buttons, spools of thread, or limp strawberry pin cushions.

Many people remember this moment of childhood deception, but few can say that it inspired their future careers. McCall is one of them—he would spend the next forty years obsessed with the little fasteners.

Today, artist Beau McCall—dubbed “The Button Man” by American Craft magazine—has works, including durags and jackets covered in row upon row of buttons, in museum collections around the world. All of these works are on view in his retrospective show Beau McCall: Buttons On! at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, open March 30, 2024, to February 2, 2025. In addition to his retrospective, McCall also has works on view in several New York City exhibitions this year: I’m a thousand different people—Every one is real exhibition at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City, OUT of the Jewelry Box and Craft Front & Center at the Museum of Arts and Design, and Africa’s Fashion Diaspora at The Museum at FIT.

The Button Man’s Humble Beginnings

McCall discovered early on that he wasn’t an athlete like his brothers. Instead, he gravitated toward crafts discovered in afterschool programs and camps, where he learned macramé, tie-dyeing, and papier-mâché. His mom was one of his biggest supporters, herself a lover of the arts. He fondly remembers art class in high school, where the surplus center provided supplies and his teacher Dolores Jones focused on crafting. Jones entered a yarn sculpture he made into a Philadelphia-wide Gimbels Department Store contest. He took third: one success in a youth spent creating and experimenting. 

McCall was born in Philadelphia, or Down South Philly, as he affectionately calls it. The artist grew up in public housing. His mom was a housewife and hung prints of Picasso and Modigliani’s works on their walls, and his father worked at a pencil company, bringing home custom monogrammed pencils with his and his brother’s names on the side for school.

“I guess back then, as children, we didn’t know we were poor,” McCall remembered. “We lived on a small budget. My mom sees things in the trash, and she was big on thrift shopping and upcycling.”

What she couldn’t or wouldn’t buy, McCall created for himself. But for McCall, his mother’s most significant collection was held in the Maxwell House coffee tin.

His opportunity to experiment with the buttons came when his mom brought home a black sweater circa 1982, and he spent hours sewing on buttons that shimmered in the disco lights when he went out clubbing at Philly’s The Smart Place. The sweater received rave reviews.

Although a “diva worshipper” in his twenties who celebrated the Black disco queens of the 1970s, he loved punk rock and founded a band called Strange Beauties with his friends. He performed in punk drag, fashioning ripped stockings, fishnets, shredded jackets, and grunge wear from thrifted clothes. As McCall affectionately remembers, his jet-black eyeliner was a cross between Grace Jones and Diana Ross. As an outlet for his wearable art, “Drag opened up another door of creativity.”

Inspiration and Loss

Strange Beauties and McCall’s time as a drag queen didn’t last long. In 1987, McCall followed a friend to New York City, carrying a duffel bag, less than $200 in cash, and a pocket full of buttons—treasured tools of his craft. His first job in the city was as a coat check clerk.

That same year, McCall and a friend attended Uptown Saturday Nite, a fashion show held at the corner of 125th and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. From the outside, the show looked like a huge block party. Inside, McCall was engulfed in a crush of Black models, designers, artists, and creatives from across the city. Without hesitation, he told his friend that he would be part of the show next year, but they just laughed him off.

McCall was not joking. Less than a year later, with half a dozen button-covered jackets in hand, he auditioned and won a spot at the Harlem Institute of Fashion.

“I knew exactly what I wanted to do,” McCall explained. “I wanted to work with these buttons and do wearable art and fashion, but also at the same time, I knew I still was connected to visual art.” McCall’s upcycling work was radical at the time. “I was in a room full of designers—when people were making things from scratch, I was remixing and repurposing and recreating things, and at that time, it really wasn’t popular.”

Over the next seven years, McCall became a force in the institute’s Black Fashion Museum Collective, presenting his button-inspired work in shows and museum exhibitions through 1995. Women’s Wear Daily featured his work, as did the PBS version of George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1991) and Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Quartier Mozart (1992). Today, his work is part of many museums and collections, from The Museum at FIT, the Victoria and Albert Museum, RISD Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, to the private collection of Debbie Harry of Blondie—his teenage self would die if he knew, he says. 

But just as he was gaining national attention for his creations, he lost the friends who inspired them.

“It was the people that I came out with, the people that I experienced all my gay life with, ” McCall explained. “They all passed on. Some died of diabetes, some died of AIDS, some died violent deaths. It was a lot of different things. Nobody survived. I’m the only survivor.”

The loss, some of it through homophobic violence, contributed to his deep depression, which halted his art practice for fifteen years. Although his work was not explicitly nor intentionally about being a Black gay man, his art has always been deeply personal. The joy of days spent at the adult bookstore, Plasmatics concerts, and Madison Square Garden shows disappeared.

“In my mind, in my head, I thought that we were all going to be old together, and it just didn’t happen.”

Returning to the Craft

McCall stopped creating and sharing his work publicly. He was remembered as a pioneer of Black fashion, albeit a hidden one. American fashion designer Patrick Kelly also created button-covered clothing in the 1980s. Unlike McCall, Kelly’s buttons referenced his grandmother, who used mismatched buttons to mend his shirts and, after he complained, used buttons as decorations on clothing. Kelly, also a Black gay fashion designer in New York City, passed away on January 1, 1990, from AIDS. Many people remember Kelly, but few knew McCall, who began working with buttons fourteen years before Kelly’s death. 

It was not until 2010, when McCall met his current life partner Peter “Souleo” Wright, a curator hailed as the “Icon of Harlem” by art historian Ruth Millington, that he returned to sharing his art. Souleo curated exhibitions and set up meetings with museums and art institutes around the country, including the Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In the 2010s, he participated in shows, often partnering with other artists, including eMerge: Danny Simmons and Artists on the Cusp at Strivers Gardens Gallery, which opened in July 2012.

In the late 2010s, McCall was approached by Rutgers University to create an artists’ book. He had assembled a scrapbook full of photos of friends who have since passed, a personal archive of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. After years of flipping through pages and reminiscing, it was falling apart, held in a bag. McCall decided that he would create collages out of the photos of his friends.

“I wanted to reverse the void that I had myself in,” McCall said. “Sort of pull all of that energy into this book, in this project, so I could have them live on.”

But in a printed book, there was no way he could sew buttons into each copy. Instead, he photographed detailed images of his button-embellished physical artworks, printed the images, then cut and pieced them together with photos of his chosen family.

The result was REWIND: MEMORIES ON REPEAT (2021), submitted the day after his close friend Tracy Monroe passed away. Published by SHINE Portrait Studio@ Express Newark, Rutgers University–Newark, the book features a vibrant look into the life of trans and queer Black individuals in Philadelphia and New York City. Although the book was released at a critical time, right as the Black Lives Matter and Trans Lives Matter movements attracted national attention, McCall clarified that he does not jump on the bandwagon of social crises for clout or relevance. This collage series, he argues, has always been about being a Black gay man coming of age in the 1970s and early 1980s. It’s always been about the pasts and presents of Black queerness, and now these collages will be part of his retrospective as well as over a hundred wearable and visual artworks.

McCall hopes these collages will provide young people with the role models he and his friends never had, so they might envision and realize the elderhood McCall imagined for himself and his friends. After publishing the book, he presented the collages in an exhibition, REWIND: HISTORY ON REPEAT, at the Stonewall National Museum in summer 2023.

His recent work reclaims and reimagines objects which define and negotiate Black identity. One of his best-known works is a floor-length, button-bedecked durag, a head covering used to create wave patterns in the hair. In this work, he uses stacked buttons to create a mohawk and covers the head and neck with transparent buttons that reflect the light of cameras or the faces of people looking at it on display. 

According to McCall, most of us think of buttons only as fasteners. “I take the button out of the everyday and present it to you in an artistic form, whether I’m doing collages, whether I’m doing a button-covered bathtub.” He sees the button, then, as universal, transcending community and speaking to human creativity and adornment. To him, discovering something hidden and so useful in a cookie tin or jelly jar is a deeply personal experience, something worthy of sharing. “I’m trying to connect the world one button at a time.”

Remembering the collections of your childhood means remembering the parent or grandparent who may have kept them first. For McCall, this means celebrating his mother, his original inspiration and still one of his strongest supporters. It also means honoring his friends who live on through every button they wore and gifted him. McCall figures that just as buttons are often the last thing found in ancient burials because of the robust materials from which they are made, his button creations, his old friends, will outlive him.

Emma Cieslik is a museum professional in the Washington, D.C., area and a former curatorial intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.