“Just recently when somebody asked me, ‘What do you do?’ It was hard for me to say that I was an artist,” said Beau McCall, over Zoom from his Harlem studio.
That might sound strange for a 67-year-old artist with a retrospective exhibition — “Beau McCall: Buttons On!” — at Fuller Craft Museum.
But McCall’s button-centric work has always fallen outside the lines. Is it fashion? Craft? Art? When he moved from his hometown of Philadelphia to Harlem in 1987, all he knew was that he was creative. He brought his portfolio of button-festooned clothes to the Harlem Institute of Fashion and found his community. Still, it wasn’t a perfect fit.
“I was amongst people who were making things from scratch,” said McCall, “I was upcycling, repurposing, recycling even before it became a thing.”
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Other designers would say things like, “Oh, that’s Beau McCall. He just sews buttons,” he remembered.
“Like he doesn’t make anything. He just sews buttons,” McCall said.
But the buttons were his magic. McCall uses them to scintillate, to tell stories, and to explore social justice issues about race, sexuality, and capitalism. “The buttons became a language to me,” he said.
In recent years, he has been making art objects with them. “Buttons On!” features, among other things, a bathtub covered in red buttons, and a school chair covered in beige ones.
A jar of buttons opened the door to McCall’s medium when he was 19.
“My mother had a Maxwell House jar of buttons that was underneath the staircase. Every time I ironed, I felt like the jar was staring me in the face saying, ‘open me,’” he told Kara Olidge, associate director of Collections and Discovery at the Getty Research Institute, in an interview in the “Button On!” catalog. “Then I decided to embellish a sweater with the buttons in the jar. From that moment I knew there was something special about this everyday object that we take for granted.”
“Everyone has a button jar,” said Beth McLaughlin, Fuller Craft’s artistic director and chief curator. “The button itself has a sense of whimsy and fun, of cuteness and liveliness.”
“From a purely technical view, Beau is extraordinary,” she added. “It’s all hand sewing. He says, ‘Glue is a four-letter word.’”
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There’s something sparkly and festive about a garment covered with buttons, and joy is baked into McCall’s aesthetic. But they are much more than an adornment.
Buttons appear in prints he made for his book, “REWIND: MEMORIES ON REPEAT,” which are now on view at Childs Gallery. The prints honor friends from his youth who are now gone.
“It’s 10 of my closest friends. Early on in my gay life, I experienced everything with them,” he said. “They helped mold and shape the man that I became today.”
Some of those friends were lost to violence, others to HIV/AIDS. By the mid-1990s, the losses took a toll. After early success, including a spread in Women’s Wear Daily, McCall grew depressed and stopped putting his work out in the world. It wasn’t until 2010, when he met his life partner Peter “Souleo” Wright, an independent curator, that McCall’s focus turned outward again.
“I didn’t want to resurface as the so-called fashion designer. I wanted to go back to my roots and be the artist,” he said. “With the visual art, I have more freedom and more leeway.”
The button-covered bathtub, which includes the pale outline of a bather, reflects on a poem from Ntozake Shange’s groundbreaking 1976 “choreopoem” about the lives of seven women of color named for the colors in the rainbow, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” Here, Shange writes of a woman who, after a sexual encounter, regains her sovereignty bathing: “layin in water/ she became herself.”
The chair, titled “ABCDEFU,” evokes McCall’s experience with racism and abuse as a young student at a Catholic school. Behind the chair, rulers suggest a clock, a religious cross, or crosshairs.
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“The message is in the title. Then we have the crosshairs in back — we got punished with yardsticks and rulers,” he said. “I call that my sweet revenge on the nuns.”
As his art practice grew, his wearable art grew more incisive. For instance, “Button Apron: Black Target.”
“It references political activities and a set of rules that being a Black man, I have to navigate in America. I have buttons of Martin Luther King and of Malcolm X,” McCall said. “I have this red button that’s a hand symbolizing the bloodshed amongst Black men.”
McCall’s life as an artist has slowly gained traction.
“It’s taken me by surprise,” he said. “I’m producing these works like they’re my kids, and I just send them out to the universe. But now people are starting to react.”
“It’s great,” he said. “I’m out and about and people are like, ‘Are you The Button Man?’”
BEAU McCALL: BUTTONS ON!
At Fuller Craft Museum, 455 Oak St., Brockton, through Feb. 2. 508-588-6000, www.fullercraft.org
BEAU McCALL — REWIND: MEMORIES ON REPEAT
At Childs Gallery, 168 Newbury St., through Aug. 4. 617-266-1108, www.childsgallery.com
A previous version of this article misstated Beau McCall’s age. He is 67. The Globe regrets the error.
Cate McQuaid can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Instagram @cate.mcquaid.