Jack Butler (artist)

Jack Butler (born 1937) is an American-Canadian visual artist. His work is in public and private collections including the National Gallery of Canada. He is a founding member of Sanavik Inuit Cooperative, Baker Lake, Nunavut. He is a medical model builder and published researcher in human development. He taught at Carnegie Mellon University, at the Banff Centre, the University of Manitoba, and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario.

Early life, education and career
Jack Butler was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1937. As a teenager, Butler worked as an illustrator for pathologist Dr Louis Goodman at Southside Hospital in Pittsburgh. Butler created some medical illustrations, recording congenital anomalies which the pathologist found during the course of his work. Butler studied at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and received his undergraduate degree, a BFA (painting and printmaking) in 1960. In 1962, Butler completed a Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

In August 1962, Butler moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada to teach at the University of Manitoba. In 1964, Butler became an instructor at the Edinburgh College of Art in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he taught print making and drawing until 1965. In 1965, Butler and his family moved back to Pittsburgh and Butler worked as an assistant professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he taught art and design; he remained in this role until 1966.

In 1969, Butler had his first major public exhibition. The exhibition, held at Lee Nordness Gallery in New York, included a print that would be included in H.W. Janson's History of Art editions from 1969 to 1985. The print depicted a flattened female torso and was "indexical as opposed to formal"; Butler wrote that this "allied my work with the development of the conceptual-art movement".

Baker Lake
In 1969, Butler and his wife Sheila Butler arrived in Baker Lake, Northwest Territories. Butler was the Arts and Crafts officer for the Northwest Territories and together with Sheila Butler they engaged and supported Inuit artists. The Butlers initiated a printmaking project, sewing projects and a shop. Butler worked to help preserve Inuit myths and legends by encouraging Inuit artists, such as Victoria Mamnguqsualuk, to create drawings and prints that incorporated those narratives.

When the Butlers first arrived, they faced staunch skepticism about their programs. The local clothing factory had recently closed and many of the established printmakers had left. The community had already seen a series of unsuccessful government programs and arts and crafts officers. In Richard Crandall's book, Inuit Art: A History, he noted that the Inuit community, prior to the Butler's arrival, "had spent thousands of hours on printmaking projects only to see them fail". Nonetheless, the Butler's printmaking project began in the craft centre and offered a wage of $1.25 to $2.00 per hour for those willing to study printmaking. In addition to hourly wages, artists were paid for final editions of prints. By 1970, the Canadian Eskimo Arts Council approved the sale of a collection of 31 prints and requested a special exhibition for the spring and the program expanded adding two more positions. Eventually, the Butlers, along with the printshop manager Ruby Arngna’naaq, and members of the community founded the Sanavik Co-operative (Inuit for Open Studio)) whose mission was to "foster and coordinate the art activities in the settlement, and to be able to contract for other community services."

Butler left Baker Lake in 1972. However, he remained as a consultant to the Co-operative until 1976.

Modelling human development
Between 1976 and 1981, Butler was a research associate at the Children's Hospital of Winnipeg (Winnipeg, Manitoba). Initially, Butler was commissioned by the Children's Hospital of Winnipeg Research Foundation to conduct basic research into the normal development of the genitalia in the human embryo and to construct models representing the developmental changes that take place during normal genital morphogenesis. Butler acted as a member of a research team that included urological surgeon Alan Decter, pediatric endocrinologist Jeremy Winter, as well as a radiologist, and a geneticist. During the initial phase of research into the literature on embryological development of the genitals, Butler was able to find schematic diagrams representing the process (which he later determined contained inaccuracies) but could find very few structurally detailed images or photographs of actual specimens. The lack of good structural information led Butler to perform microscopic observations of the developing genitals of aborted fetuses and embryos himself. His embryological research concluded by demonstrating, in the form of physical sculptures made in plasticine, that genital differentiation is based on an initial, indifferent, common genital structure.

Butler then worked with pediatric respirologist Dr Hans Pasterkamp on models describing the structure of the terminal acinus of the embryological lung. As final visualizations, in 1981, Butler constructed five physical models in acrylic that describe the development of the tips of the branches of the lung, through embryonic and fetal stages of growth up to birth.

Butler also contributed to research on cardiac embryogenesis. This project used an approach similar to the one employed in his genital embryogenesis work and culminated in the development of models depicting different stages of cardiac development. Butler created seven three-dimensional fiberglass models depicting stages eleven to eighteen of cardiac embryogenesis, and one model of a mature heart, that were used in pedagogical experiments with medical students, cardiac technologists and nurses.

Inter/trans-disciplinary practice
During the 1980s Butler's artistic practice started to become trans-disciplinary. During this period, his artworks began to integrate and explore materials from his scientific research work. One of the first appearances of medical-science-informed content in Butler's art is found in his 1983 work The Art/Science Tables which critic Robert Enright described as:

"Here is a partial, arbitrary list of possible associations anyone might make with The Art/Science Tables. If you wish, you could call them metaphors, or even descriptions: an animal vertebrae, x-rays, the transparent thorax of a huge insect, a horseshoe of Hans Hoffman's colour squares, cruciform Red Rose tea boxes'. surgical incisions, the curt of a dissolving cloud, Calder's circus, the scene of an artful accident, out-of-scale honeycombs, opaque bubbles inhabited by miniature gorillas, fetuses, the drawings of Pierre Bonnard, a printmaker's drying rack, blood, cave drawings, Francis Bacon's linear, electrified cages, shaman sticks, a gorgeous plethora of undersea creatures, the heart, a sense of play, sex, something not yet formed, Inuit and Tantric art, the body showing its stuff, a science fair, correspondence, collisions and clutter in the mind death, the soul."

By the early 1990s, much of Butler's art production circled around his research into the science, art and politics of genital development. Butler was creating large-scale prints of his genital embryogenesis works; producing, creating costumes for, and performing in a performance-work conceived of and written by Doug Melnyk called Gorilla which Butler describes as "a metaphor for 'the other,' the feminine, the spaces 'between' in the social contract".; creating large woodcut prints (Male Embryogenesis, 1990) that Butler wrote "construct a meta narrative for the crisis of my sex."; and lecture-performances in which Butler presented a theory of genital morphogenesis by drawing on his own torso and on the skin of his collaborator Dennis Wilkie.

In 1990, Butler took part in the Neomythic residency at the Banff Center for the Arts and then worked at the Banff Center for the Arts for three years (1990-1993).

In 1997, Butler received his second master's degree in Philosophy (philosophy of science) from the University of Western Ontario.

Art and Cold Cash
Between 2004 and 2007, Butler worked on the project Art and Cold Cash. The collective of artists who worked on the project included southern-Canadian visual artists Sheila Butler and Patrick Mahon, as well as northern-Canadian writer Ruby Arngna'naaq and artist William Noah. Art and Cold Cash connected contemporary art to discourses surrounding money in a series of artistic activities and experiments located in northern and southern Canada. Art and Cold Cash aimed to explore contemporary Inuit art within a context of a politics of interpretation by southern Canadian cultural workers. Art and Cold Cash was showcased in art galleries across Canada, artic settlements, the University of Edinburgh, and the Toronto Pearson International Airport.