April 13, 2021 by Rebecca Goldfine A couple of years ago, sculptor Ben Butler made a deliberate decision to almost entirely focus his career on public art. Today he's creating large installations around the country that he hopes kindle people's curiosity about natural processes, scale, and time. Ben Butler ’00 During his senior year at Bowdoin, Butler got an impulse he says he only began to understand many years later. In the weeks leading up to graduation, he borrowed 128 railroad ties from a local lumber yard. Hoisting the heavy timbers by hand, with a rotating group of friends, he constructed a series of "stacked minimalist sculptures" on campus.