What is Nutboy.world?

Welcome to the world of Nutboy, otherwise known as Theodore Cluett Bale. This is one place where his extraordinary creative mind still lives. Over time the site will grow as a comfort to those who loved him, but, as importantly, a way of making available his extraordinary art.

By day Tedd worked in hospitals and museums to pay the bills. By night he was so often reviewing dance or opera or anything that inspired him. But before all that, from when he was a little boy, he was a maker. His sister Vicki, recalls seeing Tedd from a very young age making collages and paintings and drawings. Tedd always said he tried to retain a child-like vision of the world, which from my observation was a ratio of wonder and terror. You can see it in his work.

He studied piano with his mother from a very young age as well. Later he studied music and dance at the Hartt School. He absorbed anything he could at the Wadsworth Athenaeum: old masters, minimalists, the cinema series and more. He studied film, to be sure, although not formally except for a few courses. Still, I’ve met few who have seen as much cinema or had so much to say about it. But he also loved quilting and sewing and ikebana and cooking and and and. He pursued myriad techniques to transform his surroundings and externalize a sometimes painfully but always extraordinarily vivid mind. 

Tedd was one of the purest artists I have known, which is not just my grief at his death talking (you’ll see from these astonishing works). That purity meant that he didn’t have a ready-made career as an artist. Art was what he was, not his profession.

He circulated his works in the 80s and 90s, and then when he became a critic he produced fewer “art works” per se, although he transformed every space he was in. He wanted life to be some combination of a Joseph Cornell box and Pee Wee’s playhouse. Maybe that’s why being in the world was harder for Tedd than it was for me and for many of us. And it got harder still: a terminal diagnosis looming, more than eight years of often-annihilating treatments, and the loneliness that we both, in different ways, felt because we were so utterly exhausted and not always able to be with each other or with others as we might otherwise have wished.

And yet something extraordinary happened in 2024. Tedd began to make in earnest. He didn’t want to be erased. And he wanted to tell the story of himself but not with narrative or memoir. He used what was familiar–a love of all things postal, an exquisite sensibility for icons, and a lucidity with words that came from years of immersion in literature and cinema. 

Some of Tedd’s longstanding projects (a series of quilts) came to fruition. We have three complete and three close to complete that we’re working to finish. He made several kinds of books. He made a series of jumpsuits for 9 gay artists out of traditional coveralls worn by gas station attendants and other workers (and drawn from an age in which that was the rule, not the exception). He was an archivist and bibliographer at heart. And he made many many books, which is where we’ll start: with Diana Ross.

Tedd was a practitioner of mail art, which came out of Fluxus (particularly the work of Ray Johnson) and which required the art work to engage with and to be sent through a postal system. Tedd thought about postage stamps and the kinds of stamps that stamp letters and documents. He created smaller “games” but then also made several extraordinary works in which he created a set of constraints and sent vintage postcards to himself, which he later bound into books. The first book we posted here is “Self Portrait as Trombone Solo: For Diana Ross.” All we can start with are page scans of the postcards as bound, but we’ll be adding photography and perhaps video to give you a sense of the whole. And more books (of more types) over time.

We’re still finding his works. He sent them generously to others. So if you have postcards or projects Tedd sent you, please reach out so we can arrange to document them. Or if you knew Tedd and want to help us preserve his works, reach out. 

In the meantime, view and be amazed. And send this on to anyone who might be interested. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be able to see Tedd’s works in galleries or other places. He’s still with us, after all.

Yours Truly, 

Joseph Campana

P.S. This site would not have been imaginable without Sydney Boyd and Alec Lawton, who are the driving force behind Nutboy.world. And with special thanks to Alan Ayers who got us started.