Hank Bull

Hank Bull (born 1949) is a Canadian artist and illusionist who was an early member of the Western Front Society and a founding director of the Pacific Association of Artist-run Centres.

Hank Bull was born in Calgary, Alberta. His father was an Anglican minister and his mother was a weaver. He was raised in Ontario and Nova Scotia with three brothers. By the age of 14, he began pursuing art. He spent most of 1968 in Europe, visiting art museums, experiencing the student movement, and exploring the music scene. Upon returning to Toronto he enrolled in the New School of Art, studying under Nobuo Kubota and Robert Markle.^[1] He played in bands and held jobs such as working for the railroad, picking tobacco, and tending bar. In 1973, Bull moved to Vancouver, where he joined the Western Front Society.^[2]

There, he met Kate Craig,^[3] Eric Metcalfe, Glenn Lewis, Martin Bartlett, and Patrick Ready, who later became his collaborators. He and Craig became partners in life and art and were married until she died in 2002. Bull and Ready formed the artistic duo HP, producing radio shows, shadow theatre, and other projects.

He was an early member of the Western Front Society and a founding director of the Pacific Association of Artist-run Centres. In 1998, he co-founded Centre A, the Vancouver International Centre of Contemporary Asian Art.^[4] One of Bull's formative experiences was working with artists who visited the Western Front, including Al Neil, Margaret Dragu, General Idea, Marshalore, Clive Robertson, and Robert Filliou. Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith, Steve Lacy, and Mal Waldron were among the musicians whose concerts at the Front influenced him.

In 1980, Craig and Bull travelled around the world, meeting artists and performing in Japan, Indonesia, India, Cameroon, France, Austria, and Croatia (Yugoslavia). They established relationships with video artist Ko Nakajima (Tokyo), dalang I Wayan Wija (Sukawati, Bali), musician Mama Ohandja (Yaounde), visual artists Sanja Iveković, Dalibor Martinis (Zagreb), Heidi Grundmann and Robert Adrian (Vienna).

After this experience with the globalization of culture, Bull devoted his work during the 1980s and 1990s to building networks between artists, internationally, across Canada, and in Vancouver. He played an active role in developing ANNPAC (the Association of National Non-Profit Artist-run Centres) and was a co-founder of PAARC (the Pacific Association of Artist-Run Centres). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he contributed to an informal collective of artists around the world who were experimenting with telecommunications technology, in particular slow scan video, transmission of text, and fax.^[5] He continued his collaborations with artists and worked with Mona Hatoum, Emmett Williams, Gábor and Verushka Bódy, Antoni Muntadas, Tari Ito, Santiago Bose, Heri Dono, Tetsuo Kogawa and William S. Burroughs.

In the early 1990s, Bull became engaged in exploring the relationship between art and ecology. He co-developed the Furry Creek Art Centre, an artist-in-residence initiative created in collaboration with Japanese artist Kei Tsuji. During the same period, he participated in a series of conferences organized by Littoral in Lancashire, United Kingdom, which facilitated collaborations between artists and members of agricultural communities, including sheep farmers.

In 1998, Bull co-organized the Jiangnan Project with Zheng Shengtian, a multi-venue initiative in Vancouver featuring a series of exhibitions focused on modern and contemporary art from the Shanghai region of China. The Jiangnan Project played a foundational role in the establishment of Centre A: the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art..^[6] As director of Centre A until 2010, Bull worked with curators Steven Tong, Sadira Rodrigues, Alice Ming Wai Jim, and Makiko Hara to produce over 100 exhibition projects by Canadian and international artists.

In 2015, a survey exhibition, "Hank Bull: Connexion" was organized by the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown and curated by Joni Low and Pan Wendt. Based on Bull's personal art collection and his archive of props, costumes, videos, books, and correspondence, the exhibition travelled to five public galleries across Canada.^[7][8][9]

In 2017, Bull was featured as one of six artists in an event co-presented by SFU Public Square and the Vancouver Art Gallery, highlighting artists shaping the Canada-China cultural relationship. The event included performances and discussions with artists such as Mark Rowswell (Dashan), Chan Hon Goh, Wen Wei Wang, Zheng Shengtian, and Howie Tsui. The program, moderated by Jan Walls, explored how art and culture foster human connection, empathy, and cross-cultural understanding.^[10]

In 2017 and 2019, Bull held solo exhibitions of his recent work at Franc Gallery in Vancouver.

Since 2014, he has been a Trustee of the Vancouver Art Gallery, where he chairs the Governance and Nominations Committee.

Hank Bull is married to Carey Schaefer, who is also an artist.

Bull's work has been included in exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1986), Documenta (1987) Ars Electronica (1989),^[11][7] and the Leipzig Medien Biennale (1994).

Bull's work is included in private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada,^[12] the Museum of Modern Art in New York,^[13] the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, le Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Burnaby Art Gallery, and the Video Data Bank in Chicago.^[14]

Connexion, 159 pages, Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown, 2015.

In 2014, Bull received an honorary doctorate from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.^[15]

Storm Bay (British Columbia)