Jack White Launches ‘Art & Design’ Website to Showcase Non-Music Endeavors
Jack White has launched a new website focusing on the rocker’s non-music artistic endeavors, from furniture-making and directing to graphic design and sculpture.
Jack White Art & Design, a multimedia website that went live Wednesday, serves as a catalog of White’s two decades of work in other artistic fields, many of which has never been seen by the public but are featured on the new site.
The website is divided into multiple disciplines: Industrial Design, Interior Design, Furniture & Upholstery, Graphic Design, Instruments & Hardware, Sculpture, Vinyl Concepts, Film Directing, and Photograph.
“To work with Jack White, to watch him work at anything… is to witness the mind of an artist as it explores and problem solves,” Third Man’s Ben Blackwell said in a statement. “In carpentry and interior design, being in Jack’s presence during the ideation process, the hypotheticals and head-tilting can be both inspiring and maddening. There’s no reason a building needs to have acoustical tiles, tin ceilings, or shiny yellow floors. But that’s not the point. The point is to make something beautiful.”
Before White was a White Stripe, he worked in upholstery: In 2014, a rare seven-inch vinyl he hid in a couch he upholstered was unearthed, and in 2016, White was hired to restore the couch from Sam Phillips Recording.
The film directing section focuses on White’s work behind the camera on videos for himself and the Dead Weather, along with promotional films and documentaries, while the photography section houses collections of Polaroids, double exposure Polaroids, photo booth photographs, digital photography, and photos taken using Third Man Records Impossible Film.
The interior design section captures White’s vision for this Third Man Record shops in Detroit and Nashville as well as his Three Pin Alley bowling alley and lounge.
“Any myrmidon can buy a building and start running a business selling chicken feet, but to take an empty space, to envision what you’d like it to look like, not just visually, but spatially, texturally, experientially, and design into that vision, making and taking the occasional left turns, keeping architects and contractors on their toes and folks like myself, who have to find the kind way to say ‘No Jack, I don’t think a fog machine would be a good idea for the pressing plant,’” Blackwell added. “And then to hear him explain it, with a viewing window, the public looking in, tight spotlights over each individual record press, calling the beauty and the cinematic quality he wants to highlight in this situation…most of the time I find myself saying ‘When you put it that way, it does sound pretty impressive.’”
The website will also feature a section dedicated to White’s artistic influences, like De Stijl artistic movement Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, Dutch graphic artist “Ootje” Oxenaar, and upholsterer George A. Schastey.
