| Wayne White | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Wayne White |
| Nationality | American (United States) |
| Field | Painting, cinema |
| Training | Middle Tennessee State University |
| Movement | Surrealism, pop art |
| Works | Nixon (1998) |
Wayne White is an American artist, art director, cartoonist and illustrator.
After graduating from Hixson High School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and studying at Middle Tennessee State University, White went to New York City and worked as a cartoonist and illustrator for a number of publications including The East Village Eye, Raw, The New York Times, and The Village Voice.
In 1986 he worked on Pee Wee's Playhouse where his work for his set and puppet designs won three Emmy awards; he also supplied a number of voices on the show. Other television credits include production and set design for "Shining Time Station", Riders in the Sky, The Weird Al Show and Beakman's World.[1]
He art directed two seminal music videos, Peter Gabriel's "Big Time" in 1986, for which he won a Billboard award for best Art Direction in a music video, and in 1996 he designed all the Georges Méliès inspired sets for the award-winning video for the Smashing Pumpkins, "Tonight, Tonight".
More recently he has concentrated on his painting career. He takes cheap, mass-produced lithographs which he finds in secondhand thrift stores and painstakingly writes phrases or words on them in a glossy, 3-D style. His works have been compared to Ed Ruscha. Arguably, White's most famous work is his painting Nixon, which was featured on the cover of an album, also titled Nixon, by the band Lambchop. A school friend of Lambchop's Kurt Wagner, White has contributed to four of the band's album covers. Wayne White recently came to The Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth to give a hilarious presentation of his work through the retelling of his life.
In September 2009 Wayne White installed a huge puppet head of George Jones in the Rice Gallery at Rice University in Houston, Texas. The puppet's eyes rotate in its head, and if the viewer pulls a rope, the mouth opens and a snoring noise emerges. A huge fan rotates at the base of the head, with the words "sleep" written over the fan blades. The piece is called "Big Lectric Fan to Keep Me Cool While I Sleep," in reference to George Jones's recording of "Ragged but Right."[2]