Wayne WHITE: Here Comes Mr. Know-It-All
On this page you will find announces, releases, articles, news and reviews about Wayne WHITE: Here Comes Mr. Know-It-All, an exhibition of paintings, drawings and a site-specific installation that will be created by the artist and FSW students in the week leading up to the September 11, 2015 opening and reception.
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More on ‘Wayne WHITE’ exhibition at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery opening September 11 (08-17-15)
Florida SouthWestern State College has recently announced that it will exhibit paintings, drawings and a newly-commissioned, site-specific installation by artist Wayne White. Titled Wayne WHITE: Here Comes Mr. Know-It-All, the show will open at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery on September 11, 2015 with a 6-8 p.m. reception and performance by the artist.
The exhibition will include a selection of the artist’s iconic and often “laugh-out-loud”-humorous “Word” paintings that have been favorably compared to works by Ed Ruscha. White creates these Word paintings by taking cheap, mass-produced lithographs which he finds in secondhand thrift stores and painstakingly writing phrases or words on them in a glossy, 3-D style. 
White’s most famous Word painting is Nixon, which was featured on the cover of an eponymous album by the band Lambchop. A school friend of Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, White has contributed to four of the band’s album covers.
In addition to these Word paintings, Wayne 
WHITE: Here Comes Mr. Know-It-All will also feature a series of recent watercolor drawings and collages produced during Wayne White’s month-long Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency on Captiva Island in 2013 as well as a puppet/installation of Bob Rauschenberg. 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. A huge fan rotates at the base of the head, with the words “dreaming” written over the fan blades. The piece is called “Big Lectric Fan to Keep Me Cool While I Sleep,” in reference to George Jones’s 
recording of “Ragged but Right.” White has not divulged what he has planned for his homage to Rauschenberg.
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 Art. White describes HALO AMOK as a “cubist cowboy rodeo.”
Continuing reading below for more information on Wayne White and his upcoming exhibition at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery on the Lee campus of Florida SouthWestern State College.
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Next exhibition at Bob Rauschenberg Gallery to be ‘Wayne WHITE: Here Comes Mr. Know-It-All’ (08-13-15)
Florida SouthWestern State College has announced that it will exhibit paintings, drawings and a newly-commissioned, site-specific installation by artist Wayne White. Titled Wayne WHITE: Here Comes Mr. Know-It-All, the show will open at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery on September 11, 2015 with a 6-8 p.m. reception and performance by the artist.
Wayne White is a Los Angeles-based, internationally-acclaimed artist. White won three Emmy Awards for his set design and puppeteering on the landmark children’s TV show Pee-wee’s Playhouse, creating iconic characters including Randy, Cool Cat, Chicky Baby and Dirty Dog. The subject of a 2012 feature-length documentary Beauty is Embarrassing directed by Neil Berkeley 
and a 382-page hardbound monographic book designed and edited by Todd Oldham, Maybe Now I’ll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve, Wayne White will be in residence at Florida SouthWestern State College for a week in advance of his show to work with FSW students to create a super-sized puppet/sculpture of Lee County resident artist and 
Gallery namesake Bob Rauschenberg.
In addition to his newly commissioned Bob Rauschenberg puppet/installation and related opening night performance, the exhibition Wayne WHITE: Here Comes Mr. Know-It-All will also include a selection of the artist’s now iconic and 
often “laugh-out-loud”-humorous “Word” paintings and a series of recent watercolor drawings and collages (on subjects including local environmentalist, author and political cartoonist Ding Darling) produced during Wayne White’s month-long Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency on Captiva Island in 2013.
As the artist reveals, “I’ve always had the do-it-yourself approach. I grew up in this blue collar family and didn’t have a lot of toys, so you had to make your own fun. Building forts out of sticks and scrap lumber – that’s where I learned the joy of making something from nothing.”
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery was founded as The Gallery of Fine Art in 1979 on the Lee County campus of Florida SouthWestern State College/FSW (then Edison Community College). On June , 2004 the Gallery of Fine Art was renamed the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery to honor and commemorate its long-term association 
and friendship with the artist. Over more than three decades prior to his death, the Gallery worked closely with Rauschenberg to present world premiere exhibitions including multiple installations of the ¼ Mile or Two Furlong Piece. The artist insisted on naming the space the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (versus the “Robert Rauschenberg Gallery”) as it was consistent with the intimate, informal relationship he maintained with both the Southwest Florida community and FSW.
The exhibition will run through November 7, 2015. For more information, please telephone 239-489-9313 or visit http://www.RauschenbergGallery.com.
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About the Author
Tom Hall is both an amateur artist and aspiring novelist who writes art quest thrillers. He is in the final stages of completing his debut novel titled "Art Detective," a story that fictionalizes the discovery of the fabled billion-dollar Impressionist collection of Parisian art dealer Josse Bernheim-Jeune, thought by many to have perished during World War II when the collection's hiding place, Castle de Rastignac in southern France, was destroyed by the Wehrmacht in reprisal for attacks made by members of the Resistance operating in the area. A former tax attorney, Tom holds a bachelor's degree as well as both a juris doctorate and masters of laws in taxation from the University of Florida. Tom lives in Estero, Florida with his fiancee, Connie, and their four cats.
In 2013 at the Rush Library rededication the last director of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery separated the humanity in painting from painting and declared painting vocational. A month later L Voytek performed a ceremony at Rush library where he separated the reality of physics from our art history, art making and art. These conditions of striping painting of it’s historic humanity and intellectual character were once again present in the art direction of the performance by Mr White with his giant Rauschenberg Puppet ceremoniously attacking a painting with random chaos to render painting as inane. This was in contrast to his elegant modernist paintings which are not disclosed as modernist.