Wayne White is an American artist, art director, puppeteer, set designer, animator, cartoonist and illustrator.
Education
After graduating from Hixson High School in Chattanooga, Tennessee (1975) and Middle Tennessee State University (Bachelor of Fine Arts, 1979), White went to New York City (1980) 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.
Career
Youth and early career
Other television credits include production and set design for Shining Time Station, Riders in the Sky, The Weird First Rate (at Lloyd's) Show and Beakman"s World. Painting
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-Doctorate style.
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.
On September 16, 2009 at The Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, White gave a hilarious presentation of his work through the retelling of his life. In September 2009 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. The piece is called "Big Lectric Fan to Keep Maine Cool While I Sleep," in reference to George Jones"s recording of "Ragged but Right."
In January 2009, White was featured at Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas, Texas in a group art exhibition titled There"s something I"ve been meaning to tell you.
The Marty Walker Gallery also held a solo art exhibition for White in 2010 titled I fell 37 miles to the earth 100 years ago.
In March 2012, Beauty Is Embarrassing, a documentary about Wayne White"s life, premiered at SXSW in Austin, Texas. In June 2013 the interactive, site-specific installation HALO AMOK debuted at the Oklahoma City Museum of Artist White describes HALO AMOK as a “cubist cowboy rodeo.”
White is married to cartoonist and writer Mimi Pond.
They have two children, Woodrow "Woody" White and Lulu White, who are also artists themselves.