In case you don’t recognize the name Wayne White, he grew up in the 1960s on the outskirts of Chattanooga, he studied art at Middle Tennessee State University, and he was in New York City when the downtown art scene there was heating up in the late ’70s and early ’80s. He was already an accomplished cartoonist and illustrator, and he was lucky enough to join the crew as an Emmy Award-winning puppeteer and set designer on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. He also worked on music videos with Peter Gabriel (“Big Time”) and Smashing Pumpkins (“Tonight, Tonight”). A painting of White’s is a Lambchop album cover (“Nixon”).
Drop the Country Boy Act
Today, White lives in Los Angeles. His signature work: words, phrases, or whole sentences that White paints onto mass-produced thrift-store artwork — images of an ideal never-never land depicting rural America at its most surreal. As in, at left, White’s Drop the Country Boy Act.
AMMO books has recently published the coffee-table-worthy Wayne White: Maybe Now I’ll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve, a monograph on the artist from the studio of designer Todd Oldham.
What follows: some questions put to and words from Wayne White.
