Art, Coffee & Cigarettes: Meredith “Butch” Marshall Jack, 1943-2024

Meredith Marshall Jack, better known to his friends as “Butch,” passed away at his home in Houston, Texas on June 28, 2024. An artist who worked in sculpture, drawing, painting, printmaking, ceramics, and installation, Butch’s insatiable intellectual curiosity fueled his creative journey throughout his career. He was an Emeritus Professor at Lamar University’s Department of Art & Design, retiring in 2010, and had been a beloved figure in the Houston Art Community since the 1970s. His absence will be deeply felt.

I first met Butch shortly after completing graduate school in 1997 within the Houston art scene, and later became his colleague when I began teaching at Lamar University the following year. As we both lived in Houston and shared teaching days, we commuted  180 miles together twice a week until his retirement in 2010. We spent a lot of hours and a lot of miles together.

How do you say goodbye to someone who has been a steadfast presence in your life for over 25 years? Sunday mornings with Butch were often spent over coffee and cigarettes while conversing about solving all the problems in the art world, politics, and life.

Although I have known Butch for years, I can’t say I knew him completely. There were too many facets to his story. Some sides were rough and unpolished and other sides cut to perfection and shimmering in the light, much like his striking eyes. I can only give you a small glimpse of Butch Jack; to understand the bigger picture, you would need to speak with the countless artists and students he influenced over the decades. He touched the lives of so many, and I was fortunate to be one of them.

He came to Houston by way of a small rural town, Tonganoxie, Kansas. His undergraduate studies were at the University of Kansas where he earned his BFA with a concentration in printmaking. He then entered graduate school at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, where he found his love for three-dimensional forms and changed his MFA concentration to sculpture. His education was interrupted in 1969 when he was drafted into the Vietnam War. After his Basic Training, he was sent to Fort Monmouth, NJ for further training at the U.S. Army Signal School. He received intensive training in sophisticated electronics with a specialty in high-grade, long-haul communications, and subsequently, spent a one-year tour of duty in Southeast Asia, assigned to the 369th Signal Battalion, and was discharged upon his return.

After completing his military service, in the fall of 1971, he re-entered the Tyler School of Art and received his Master of Fine Arts degree in the spring of 1972. The next fall he accepted his first teaching appointment at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Somewhere amidst all this, he also spent time living in New York, although I don’t recall the exact dates.

In 1976, Butch and his then-wife moved to Houston. When I asked Butch what brought him to Texas, he recalled, “At the time, everyone around the country was talking about exciting things happening in the arts in Texas, so my wife and I came down to see what it was all about. We spent some time in Dallas, then Austin, and ended up in Houston. When we got to Houston, I knew we had arrived in the land of milk & honey.” And so, another Houstonian was born.

For the first year I knew Butch, I thought he hated my guts. He was argumentative and abrasive. I had never encountered someone so direct. “Oh Prince, that’s just horse shit,” was a common phrase I would hear on our drives to work. He loved a healthy debate, a good fight. Sometimes I wondered if he took a counterposition simply for the sake of debate. If I said, “The sky is up,” he would say, “Well, hold on a minute,” and make an intellectual argument about the context and relativity of what “up” actually meant. We spent countless hours driving through the rice fields of I-10, engaging in these silly, fun, unimportant arguments just for debate’s sake.

It took time for me to realize that his gruff “curmudgeon” exterior hid someone who deeply cared about others and genuinely wanted to see everyone succeed. One example of this was his generosity with his time. He had an open-door policy at his home and studio, never minding a pop-in from a friend. He was a wealth of information. Many artists would visit to seek his help with technical problems. Many, including myself, sought his advice when trying to fabricate something. He was willing to not only describe how to solve the problem, but roll up his sleeves and show you how to make what you needed using his studio equipment.

“Start your own mafia,” he would say.

This generosity extended to his students as well. We both had our last class of the day wrap up around 8:15 p.m.  — I taught an evening photography class, and he had a ceramics class. But we rarely left campus before 9:30 p.m.  because Butch would always spend extra time with students, showing them various techniques for refining their approach on the potter’s wheel. Additionally, he often invited students struggling with their thesis papers to his house on weekends to help them with their writing.

Another example of his generosity was his monthly Saturday tours of Houston public art and venues for his students throughout the school year. I once asked him, “Butch, that must be a pain to get students to sign all the liability forms to go on trips every month.” He replied, “No, I don’t have them sign any forms because it is not a class requirement and does not affect their grades. I simply say, on this Saturday, I will be at this location at this time. If you happen to be there, I will show you some art.” To my surprise, students always showed up. 

His ulterior motive was to expose students from Beaumont to Houston and help them overcome their fears of the big city. His students knew that he cared about them and their success. This  was evidenced by the number of ex-students who continued to pop in for a visit long after he retired from teaching. He firmly believed we were all in this together, and his porch light was always on.

“That’s the pioneer can-do spirit.”

He was a prominent figure in the cast-iron community. In the 70s, he and his colleague Phil Fitzpatrick started annual Iron Pours at Lamar University, engaging students and the local community in the thrilling and potentially dangerous act of pouring molten iron. Butch created a welcoming environment where everyone was encouraged to observe or participate, always prioritizing safety. He was proud to say he never had a foundry mishap on his watch. Butch also forged relationships with the Donny Keen Foundry in Houston, allowing students to create work at a professional foundry. I can honestly say I didn’t know what hard work was until I was up on a two-story platform at Donny’s, throwing engine blocks into an industrial furnace. It was frightening, thrilling, exhausting — and fun.

Butch was regularly invited to present at various professional organizations, conferences, and workshops, including Sloss Furnaces in Alabama, the International Sculpture Center, the Texas Sculpture Group, the International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art, Johnson Atelier, the Iron Gorge Museum in England, and countless universities across the country. He played a key role in bringing the International Sculpture Conference to Houston and threw a “helluva” conference party at his studio.

An entrepreneur at heart, Butch was a side-hustler before the term existed. He owned CSI Turntables & Ware-carts in Houston, manufacturing equipment for professional and student ceramicists. If you ever bought a lazy Susan potter’s wheel from the Ceramics Store in Houston, you were likely using one of Butch’s products.

“A silver-tongued devil.”

Butch was particular. Every clock in his house was set five minutes fast, every extension cord had to be rolled up in a specific way — he had tons of little quirks that I later learned were the result of years of trial and error to find what worked best for him. When he offered advice and you chose to do it your way and failed, he’d respond with a sly grin, “Nobody ever listens to me!” Despite his intellectual curiosity, he loved “trashy novels,” with Clive Cussler being one of his favorites. He enjoyed listening to Garrison Keillor, watching Masterpiece Theater, and PBS British mysteries. Houston Public Radio was always on in his home or studio. He was an excellent cook and loved dance, classical music, and rock ‘n’ roll. Our last music conversations were about Procol Harum and Cream — he was a fan of Clapton’s guitar work.

Butch had a deep love for animals. Like the Pied Piper, animals seemed to find their way to him — cats and dogs with names like Prudence, Flash, Zarkov, Lil-Girl, Brutus, Burton, Nibbles, Thursday, Spot, Prince, and Sunday. Over the years, they would wander into his studio, and he welcomed them to stay if they so chose. In my years of knowing Butch, I saw him cry only once. It was the morning I went to pick him up for work, and his dog Prudence had passed away. He loved Prudence dearly; she had been with him through various moves and marriages, his constant companion. Seeing him break down shattered my heart.

“The only thing that makes an artist an artist, is making art.”

Meeting Butch as a young artist, he was a tremendous mentor, showing by example what it took to sustain a career. He was in the studio every day. EVERY DAY. He clocked in and clocked out. There was always a piece he had that needed to be finished or a piece that needed to be started.

Everyone remembers where they were on September 11, 2001. That morning, I walked out of the apartment I was renting from Butch on his studio compound and went to his kitchen where he was making his morning coffee. “Have you been watching?” I asked. We turned on the TV and watched in horror as Charlie Gibson announced the second plane crashing into Tower Two. We sat in silence, witnessing the day’s horrific events. After hours of watching, he got up and said, “I can’t watch anymore, I have to get to work.” He left to go to his studio and make art. Art was his passion, his love, and his therapy through difficult times.

Butch was logical and intellectual while being deeply passionate. His work leaned towards formalist abstraction, rooted in intuitive play. I call it “charged abstraction” because each series had a strong conceptual foundation. But you had to dig a little deeper to recognize that ground, or you might get lost in the formal beauty, which was just fine with Butch. His work was grounded in his life experiences, from construction sites he worked on as a boy, to the landscapes of Kansas, his war experiences in Vietnam, and the rice fields of Texas. His art meshed formal structures with deeply personal experiences, including lost loves represented by the recurring theme of a rose.

In speaking about his work he said, “I begin from a vague notion that this part should go with that part and will look sort of like this, but I’m never certain until I have done it. The process of discovery is the enjoyment of making; if I knew exactly what something was going to look like when it was finished, I probably wouldn’t make it.” He was sometimes self-effacing, a little resentful that his work never received wider attention. All artists feel this way; we all want more recognition and more opportunities. But after almost six decades of actively creating, I think he had earned the right to feel that way if he wanted. 

Timing can be a cruel beast. In a world where self-promotion and social media are crucial for getting noticed, Butch didn’t operate that way. He believed his work would speak for itself and he didn’t need to shout from the rooftops. The world changed in the last 25 years, and he couldn’t find it in himself to be a self-promoter. Timing. He often talked about having bad timing. The Vietnam War delayed his MFA graduation, and by the time he was out, the university teaching market had dried up. Had he not gone to war, he would have graduated with his friends years earlier, who then secured various teaching positions at prestigious institutions around the country. But by the time he graduated, those highly desirable positions had been filled. Also, meeting Walter Hopps towards the end of Walter’s life was another instance of bad timing, in Butch’s view. Hopps had taken an interest in Butch and his art and wanted to collaborate, but Hopps died before that vision could be realized.

Butch worked to the very end. When he was in and out of the hospital the last few months of his life, all he wanted was to get back into his studio, to see his workspace one more time. When he could no longer walk, he would ask to be wheeled into his studio to give instructions to his studio assistants on the next changes to be made on various works. As I write, one work is currently at the powder-coaters based on Butch’s instruction, and several others are being refurbished according to his guidance, even though he is no longer with us. He was an artist to the very end.

Meredith Marshall Jack was my colleague, mentor, and friend. We will all miss you.

And I imagine Butch would reply, “The answer is 42.”

The family is planning a public celebration of life for his friends and the Houston art community at his Houston studio on November 9, 2024. More information to come as the date approaches.