page_title: Jack Kevorkian
section_title: Art career
hierarchical_section_title: Jack Kevorkian / Career / Art career
caption_attribution_description: English: A concert program from the first performance of Jack Kevorkian's classical organ compositions. The concert took place on Tuesday, April 30, 1996 at the Central United Methodist Church in Waterford, Michigan, performed by Craig Rifel.
context_page_description: Jack Kevorkian was an American pathologist, and euthanasia proponent. He publicly championed a terminal patient's right to die by physician-assisted suicide, embodied in his quote "Dying is not a crime". Kevorkian claimed to have assisted at least 130 patients, to that end. He was convicted of murder in 1999 and was often portrayed in the media with the name of "Dr. Death". There was support for his cause, and he helped set the platform for reform.
  In 1998, Kevorkian was arrested and tried for his direct role in a case of voluntary euthanasia on a man named Thomas Youk who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS. He was convicted of second-degree murder and served 8 years of a 10-to-25-year prison sentence. He was released on parole on June 1, 2007, on condition he would not offer advice, participate, nor be present in the act of any type of suicide involving euthanasia to any other person; as well as neither promote nor talk about the procedure of assisted suicide.
context_section_description: Kevorkian was a jazz musician and composer. The Kevorkian Suite: A Very Still Life was a 1997 limited-release CD of 5,000 copies from the 'Lucid Subjazz' label. It features Kevorkian on the flute and organ playing his own works with "The Morpheus Quintet". It was reviewed in Entertainment Weekly online as "weird" but "good-natured". As of 1997, 1,400 units had been sold. Kevorkian wrote all the songs but one; the album was reviewed in jazzreview.com as "very much grooviness" except for one tune, with "stuff in between that's worthy of multiple spins".
  The first public performance of the complete classical organ works by Jack Kevorkian was by Craig Rifel in a live concert on January 30, 1996 at Central United Methodist Church in Waterford, Michigan, including Kevorkian's Prelude & Fugue in E-flat, Pipe Dream, Sonata in D, Passacaglia on B-A-C-H, Pastorale & Fugue in B-Flat, and Fantasy & Fugue in C. In 1999 the Geneva-based self-determination society EXIT commissioned David Woodard to orchestrate wind settings of Kevorkian's organ works.
  He was also an oil painter. His work tended toward the grotesque and surreal, and he had created pieces of symbolic art, such as one "of a child eating the flesh off a decomposing corpse". Of his known works, six were made available in the 1990s for print release. The Ariana Gallery in Royal Oak, Michigan, is the exclusive distributor of Kevorkian's artwork. The original oil prints are not for release. Sludge metal band Acid Bath used his painting "For He is Raised" as the cover art for their 1996 album Paegan Terrorism Tactics.
  In 2011, his paintings became the center of a legal entanglement between his sole heir and a Massachusetts museum.
caption: Concert program from Jack Kevorkian's 1996 concert
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