“But that’s the way I was then and maybe still am: my ambition always outstripped my abilities.” A Two-Part Interview with Wayne White

Part One:

If you have watched Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Peter Gabriel’s video for “Big Time,” or the Smashing Pumpkins’ video for “Tonight, Tonight,” you’ve seen Wayne White’s art. White’s ingenuity and his extensive body of work are becoming better known through the 2009 monograph Maybe Now I’ll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve, and the 2012 documentary about White, Beauty is Embarrassing, directed by Neil Berkeley.

As an artist who works in many mediums—painting, sculpture, print-making, drawing, stop-motion animation, and installation—puppets have also been a constant throughout White’s career. While the importance of puppets to White is evident in the monograph and documentary, I wanted to find out how White became interested in puppets and to learn more about his influences. In all of his work White is inspired by a wide-range of sources, from pop culture to his close study of artists. Drawing upon these he creates unique and inviting works and, when given the chance, impressive installations, as he achieved with BIG LECTRIC FAN TO KEEP ME COOL WHILE I SLEEP at Houston’s Rice University Art Gallery in 2009 and BIG LICK BOOM at Roanoke’s Taubman Museum of Art in 2012.  

In August of 2012, a few weeks before the national release of Beauty is Embarrassing, I spoke to White by phone. He was in Los Angeles and I was in North Carolina. As our conversation began he mentioned that he was drinking a Coca-Cola. 

—Julie Thomson

I. Jean Dubuffet’s Punk Rock Puppet Show

THE BELIEVER: How did you become interested in puppets?

WAYNE WHITE: Well I never played with puppets at all when I was a kid. I don’t think I owned one puppet. I used to see the Muppets on television before Sesame Street; they used to be on the Ed Sullivan Show in the 60s. I kind of liked those, but the way I got involved with them was my friend Mike Quinn at Middle Tennessee State University made these funky hand puppets so he could get out of doing a term paper for his forestry class [Laughs]. One day I saw them all in the floorboard of his car and I picked one up and I thought hmmm, maybe I could get out of my term paper in art history class by doing a puppet show.

BLVR: Did it work?

WW: Yes. I did a puppet show at the teacher’s house. He arranged a big keg party, he was not much older than us, and we did a puppet show called Punk and Juicy. That was my entree into...