Jack White launches a multimedia website to showcase 20 years of art and design work

Hear the name Jack White and you immediately think of the rock duo The White Stripes. But singing and guitar playing aside, how many know of his artistic and design ventures? Jack White has today announced the launch of Jack White Art & Design, a new multimedia website that houses all of his creative work from the last two decades. Cataloguing his key projects, the work spans industrial design, interior design, furniture and upholstery, graphic design, instruments and hardware, sculpture, vinyl concepts, film directing and photography.

Born in Detroit and residing in Nashville, Jack worked as an apprentice under the upholsterer Brian Muldoon, during which he was exposed to mid-century design and local Detroit Cass Corridor artists (those who were influenced by the Cass Corridor artist movement) such as Gordon Newton and Robert Sestok. Not only did he go on to found Third Man Records, an independent record label that launched in 2001, he also launched upholstery shop Third Man Upholstery in 1996. His sculpture and upholstery work, however, has remained largely private over the last 20 years, with the launch of his website offering a glimpse into his world as a designer.

The site surveys a selection of Jack’s industrial design projects, like the concept and design for vinyl production facility Third Man Pressing, plus the interior photos of his Third Man Recording Studio. Other projects in this field include Clark Park Baseball Field in Southwest Detroit and the Third Man Rolling Record Store. As for interior design, the site presents the Third Man Records shops and headquarters in Detroit and Nashville, as well as his own bowling alley with bar and lounge, Three Pin Alley.

Jack’s furniture and upholstery projects include an office chair restored in 2014 for Woodland Studios owners Gillian Welch and David Rawlings; a sofa for Ram Phillips Recording studio; a Warrior Chair for the showroom of Warstic, a company he co-owns that makes baseball bats; the Aluminium Chair Set he created during lockdown; and the Triple 78 Chair that pays tribute to the structure of Third Man Records.

Elsewhere, along with various photographs and films, the site presents handmade show posters and flyers from 1997-2001, cover art from The White Stripes, plus iconic album covers and posters. Viewers will also learn of his work with Third Man Hardware, as well as his custom-designed guitars, drum kits and various other instruments and hardware. Not to mention his sculpting pieces such as Dog House (1995) and Machine Gun Fan (1997), the latter designed by Jack in his Detroit studio and still in use today at Third Man Upholstery studio.

“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 the release. “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.’”