Born in Detroit in 1975 and currently residing in Nashville, Jack White is an interdisciplinary artist, equally as conversant in sculpture and upholstery as he is in music and songwriting. Exposed to both mid-century modern design and local Detroit Cass Corridor artists like Gordon Newton and Robert Sestok while apprenticing under master upholsterer Brian Muldoon, White would take those seedlings of inspiration and open his own upholstery shop, Third Man Upholstery, in 1996. Housed in Detroit’s artist-friendly Pioneer Building, White would not only run his business from the location, but also utilize it to work on sculpture and songwriting. Upon his closing of the space in 1998, he left a ceiling beam scrawled with the message, “Jack White was here and part of him will never leave.”
The past 20 years have seen White further exploring his design muse via myriad projects under the visionary Third Man Records umbrella. No matter the project – which span multiple disciplines and more often than not, combine them with uncommon creativity – Jack White designs with purpose, with conviction, and with passion.
Jack White Art & Design surveys White’s evolving body of work to date through detailed pages breaking down his efforts through individual practice. Industrial Design showcases White’s concept and design for the innovative Third Man Pressing plant and other Third Man facilities, including the first ever published interior photos of White’s famed Third Man Recording Studio, home to almost all of his recordings since its 2008 inception. Other examples in this field include Clark Park Baseball Field in Southwest Detroit and the customized Third Man Rolling Record Store.
White’s work within Interior Design includes Third Man Records shops and headquarters in Detroit and Nashville, plus his own Three Pin Alley, a professional bowling alley with bar and lounge that took over a year and a half to complete.
Largely confined to private work over the past 20 years, Furniture & Upholstery offers first-ever public views of projects including an office chair restored in 2014 for Woodland Studios owners Gillian Welch and David Rawlings; an original Sam Phillips Recording studio couch, refurbished by White at the personal request of the Phillips family; the one-of-a-kind Warrior Chair, White’s first design contribution to the showroom of the Dallas company Warstic (which he co-owns with founder Ben Jenkins and Golden Glove second baseman Ian Kinsler); the Aluminum Chair Set, a series of four chairs hand stained and refinished by White during the pandemic lockdown of 2020; and the Triple 78 Chair, a very personal, and ultimately deeply cathartic project for White in which he pays tribute to the structure of Third Man Records itself.
The Graphic Design section gathers a remarkable retrospective of work that includes handmade show posters and flyers from 1997-2001, cover art spanning The White Stripes’ 1998 7” debut single, “Let’s Shake Hands,” through iconic albums and singles from The White Stripes and his own solo work, Third Man logos, and the GRAMMY® Award-winning collections The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records: Volume One, 1917-1927 and The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records: Volume Two, 1928-1932 (both designed in collaboration with Dean Blackwood and Susan Archie).
Instruments and Hardware showcases White’s revolutionary work with Third Man Hardware (including unique collaborations with numerous music equipment and effects pedal companies) as well as custom designed guitars, drum kits, the iconic Peppermint Triple Tremolo Unit, and the Diddley Bow, a one-string, entry-level instrument constructed on-camera as the opening scene to Davis Guggenheim’s award-winning 2009 documentary “It Might Get Loud,” and later displayed at the Museum of Design Atlanta as part of their 2019 exhibition Wire & Wood.
White’s Sculpture sees the public premiere of a number of varied works including 1995’s “Dog House,” 1997’s “Machine Gun Fan,” a working sculpture designed and constructed by White at his Detroit studio and still used today at the Third Man Upholstery studio, and 2015’s “dead” sculpture, “The Red Tree.”
The past decade has seen White and Third Man Records bringing to life countless ideas new to the century-old vinyl format. Vinyl Concepts showcases such innovations as the Under Label Groove, the first-ever commercially released Liquid Filled LP, the Triple Decker Record, Tri-Color Records, and the groundbreaking ULTRA LP.
Film & Directing gathers numerous music videos directed by White for his solo work and his band, The Dead Weather, along with videos for Third Man recording artists The Black Belles, a Technique and Instrument Series (featuring members of The Dead Weather), promotional films, documentary looks at the famed Third Man Record Booth and ULTRA LP, and short films previously only seen as projections during 2018’s Boarding House Reach world tour.
White’s Photography is represented here with collections of Polaroids, Double Exposure Polaroids, Photo Booth Photographs, Digital Photography, and photos taken using Third Man Records Impossible Film, a custom duochrome instant film conceived by White and created by the Dutch company, The Impossible Project (now known as Polaroid).
Jack White Art & Design also includes an interactive, in-depth guide to White’s primary art and design influences, among them prolific commercial artist Norman Saunders, industrial designer George Nelson, Gilded Age cabinet maker, decorator, and upholsterer George A. Schastey, industrial design pioneer Henry Dreyfuss, Dutch furniture designer, architect, and principal member of the De Stijl artistic movement Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, and Dutch graphic artist and visual artist “Ootje” Oxenaar.
“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,” says Third Man’s Ben Blackwell. “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. 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.’
“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.’”
