Clyde Butcher gallery Big Cypress
— a small room that holds a very large swamp.
Not only on a wall.
Clyde Butcher gallery Big Cypress, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A low building off US 41, set back into cypress and wet prairie. Inside, the walls carry Clyde Butcher's large-format black-and-white prints of the same swamp visible through the screen door. The contrast between the room and the world it photographs is the point. A boardwalk runs out behind the gallery so the visitor can see, in colour and at scale, what the prints have just shown them in silver. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Big Cypress Gallery sits on US 41, the Tamiami Trail, about halfway between Naples and Miami inside Big Cypress National Preserve. The preserve was created by Congress in 1974 as the first national preserve in the U.S. system and covers roughly 729,000 acres of cypress strand, wet prairie, and pine flatwoods bordering Everglades National Park. Photographer Clyde Butcher opened the gallery in 1992. The property includes the gallery, a small studio, two rental cottages, and a boardwalk into the cypress swamp directly behind the building.
Butcher works in large-format black-and-white, often shooting with a view camera that takes negatives up to twelve by twenty inches. The prints inside the gallery are made from those negatives and run as large as five by ten feet. He has photographed Big Cypress, the Everglades, and other American wilderness areas since the early 1980s and is often called the Ansel Adams of the swamp. The hush inside the gallery is intentional. The work asks the visitor to slow down before stepping back outside into the heat.
The gallery is open daily and free to enter, with seasonal hours that shift between summer and the winter dry season. Guided swamp walks led by Butcher's staff run from November through April, when water levels and temperatures are more forgiving. The Swamp Cottages behind the gallery can be rented overnight by reservation, putting guests inside Big Cypress after the day visitors leave. The nearest food and fuel are at Ochopee, four miles west, home of the small Ochopee Post Office.
