Wayne White goes home: Wayne-O-Rama in Chattanooga

If you watched children’s television in the late 1980s you have seen Wayne White’s work, even if the name means nothing. He was one of the designers and puppeteers behind Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the gloriously strange Saturday morning show whose talking furniture and cardboard-bright sets won him three of his four Emmy awards for art direction. He went on to design music videos, including Peter Gabriel’s Big Time and the Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight, and to work as an illustrator, animator and set designer. In 2012 Neil Berkeley’s documentary Beauty Is Embarrassing told his story and found him a new audience.

These days he is better known in the art world for two things. One is his word paintings: cheap reproduction landscapes bought from thrift shops, into which he paints huge, carefully shaded letters spelling out phrases that are funny, rude or quietly sad. The other is his installations, rooms full of enormous puppet heads and hand-built sculpture that visitors can walk through and, often, operate.

A funhouse for Chattanooga

His newest and biggest project takes him back to where he started. White was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and on Saturday 19 November 2016 the city opens Wayne-O-Rama, a year-long installation that walks through the history of the city and the wider South by way of giant puppets, large dioramas, peep shows, paintings and animation, from prehistory to the present day.

Two local arts organisations are behind it, Tenn Arts and the Shaking Ray Levi Society, and it is housed in the Tenn Arts studio on Rossville Avenue. The lead sponsor is See Rock City, Inc., the company behind the famous Lookout Mountain attraction whose painted barn roofs once lined the highways of the South, with support from the Benwood, Footprint, Lyndhurst and McKenzie foundations.

The cast of characters is local and wide ranging. Lookout Mountain itself appears, as does Dragging Canoe, the Cherokee war chief who resisted settlement in the region in the 18th century. So does Bessie Smith, the blues singer born in Chattanooga, and Bob Brandy, a much-loved figure of the city’s local broadcasting, along with a crowd of other notable Chattanoogans. More than 300 artists and helpers from the city and further afield have worked under White’s direction, turning wood, Styrofoam and cardboard into scenery and figures.

The civic welcome

Chattanooga is plainly delighted to have him back. The opening afternoon includes a ribbon cutting and speeches from officials and sponsors as well as White himself, and a joint proclamation from the City of Chattanooga and Hamilton County names 19 November Wayne White Day of Art and Education. The installation then stays open until September 2017, with a suggested donation in place of a ticket and a promise that nobody will be turned away for lack of money. The donations go towards running costs and an education programme.

White describes the project as a wonderland passed straight from his imagination to the visitor’s, and as a funhouse for every age. His shorthand for it is “the Smithsonian Museum meets Goony Golf”, which is about as accurate a summary of his whole approach as anyone could write. He calls it a celebration of the culture that made him and a present to his home town, and says he hopes it speaks to young and old, to the Southern experience and beyond it.

Why it matters beyond Tennessee

There is a thread here that connects to a lot of what gets written about on these pages. White’s work comes from the same impulse as much street art: take cheap, overlooked materials, make something outsized and funny with them, and put it where ordinary people can reach it. Cardboard puppets and painted-over thrift store pictures are not so far from paste-ups and reworked billboards. The difference is that his home town has decided to hand him a building, a year and a proclamation.