Dakota Jackson

Dakota Jackson (born August 24, 1949) is an American furniture designer known for his eponymous furniture brand, Dakota Jackson, Inc., his early avant-garde works involving moving parts or hidden compartments, and his collaborations with the Steinway & Sons piano company. later becoming a celebrity designer in the 1980s. His background in the world of stage magic helped him get his first commissions and is often cited as the source of his point-of-view.

Early life

Dakota Jackson was born on August 24, 1949, and grew up in the Rego Park neighborhood of Queens, New York.

Stage Magic

Jackson's father, Jack Malon, was a professional magician. Mr. Malon learned the trade from his own father, who studied stage magic in early 20th century Poland. Jackson's name, in fact, grew out of a road trip to Fargo, North Dakota. and at children's birthday parties. Jackson also began to build his own props, including large boxes for sawing a woman in half and small boxes from which doves would emerge in full flight.

After Jackson graduated from Forest Hills High School in 1967, he continued performing as a magician, working in art galleries, night clubs, touring in the Catskills, and giving private performances at society events. When he was 17, Jackson had studied with magician Jack London to learn the dangerous bullet catch trick.

"What appealed to me was the notion of doing things that appeared miraculous" Jackson once recalled. Jackson became part of the Downtown scene, a community of "artists, dancers, performers, and musicians" who moved to the neighborhood for the cheap rent and social life.

In October 1970, Jackson performed with the Japanese group Tokyo Kid Brothers at New York's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club (also known as Café La MaMa) in a rock musical production called "Coney Island Play" ("Konī airando purē). The show explored themes of cross-cultural communication and understanding Jackson played the part of a "clever conjurer."

Jackson credits his exposure to minimalism and minimalist dance in particular as having had a strong influence on his approach to design; in 1989, Jackson told the Los Angeles Times:

For me the essential fineness of a design is in the idea, not the object itself ... In minimalism, the object is pared down to its basic meaning by stripping away all the excrescence ... —those elements that do not contribute to the pure idea.

Design career

In the early 1970s, as he experimented with performance and dance, Jackson began branching out as a special effects consultant to other magicians, film producers, and musicians

Recognizing his skills as a builder, Jackson decided to shift away from performance and become a full-time maker. "She wanted to make a piece of furniture that would be a mystical object; that would be like a Chinese puzzle," Jackson recalled in a 1986 interview published in the Chicago Tribune.

In 1978, a bed designed for fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg garnered Jackson even more notoriety. Called "The Eclipse", the bed was described in The New Yorker as "large, astounding, sumptuous, with sunbursts of cherry wood and quilted ivory satin at head and foot."

Commissions like these continued to come in Jackson and his peers were part of the "American Art Furniture Movement," a group sometimes called the "Art et Industrie Movement," named after the leading art furniture gallery of the era,

In a 1984 Town & Country article titled "Art You Can Sit On," Kaufmann said he created the gallery to "serve as a locus to the public for artists and designers creating new decorative arts."

The Sun-Sentinel described the Saturn Stool as "a pink planet seat surrounded by a pale green ring on an aluminum hydraulic lift..." The anodized aluminum and lacquered wood stool became synonymous with Jackson's work and, a decade later, it was used in an ad for Absolut Vodka titled "Absolut Jackson".

Jackson called this body of work the Deadly Weapons series. In concept and style, these works straddled the worlds of art and design and drew inspiration from the cutting-edge technology of the day, such as the Rockwell B-1 Lancer, or B1 Bomber as it was commonly known.

Jackson's work during this period became associated with the industrial style for home furnishings, a new design trend that was documented in Joan Kron's and Suzanne Slesin's 1978 book "High-Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home." In the catalog for The Whitney exhibition "High Styles: Twentieth-Century American Design," curator Lisa Phillips pointed to Jackson's Saturn Stool as an example of contemporary products with a "high-tech hardware look." In a review of the exhibition, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith observed that Jackson's stool was one of the few objects in the exhibition that seemed ready for mass production. "One-of-a-kind design has a limited appeal to a limited group of collectors," he continued; "the day of the patron-client relationship is behind us." to increase production output and create designs that could be manufactured in multiple. When he started building in the early 1970s, Jackson was able to complete six pieces a year with the help of a single assistant. After sales grew to over 100 pieces a year in 1978, Jackson moved again, this time to a 12,500 square foot factory in Long Island City with a staff of 15. approach was the New Classics, "I've extracted the signature elements from my work and am moving into a more affordable price range," Jackson told USA Today. Jackson—along with architects Robert Venturi and Michael Graves—helped to define the new style

Ke-zu Collection

In 1989, Jackson entered the mass-produced contract furniture market chaise longue and grew to include a range of leather-covered arm chairs, side chairs, club chairs, ottomans, and sofas. earning a place in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum and in fashion advertisements of the day.

Vik-ter Chair

In 1991, Jackson introduced the "biomorphic" Vik-ter Stacking Chair (commonly known as the Vik-ter Chair) at the third annual International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. The chair's "highly production oriented" design included a curving welded-steel frame and a tapered laminated cherry plywood seat that could be produced in seven minutes.

The Vik-ter Chair was Jackson's first design that could be mass-produced and priced competitively. It received a silver award for environmental design in the 1992 Industrial Design Excellence Awards, awards from I.D., Metropolis, and Interior Design magazines, and was shown in exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, the American Craft Museum (now known as the Museum of Arts and Design), and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Both the American Craft Museum and the Cooper-Hewitt obtained the Vik-ter Chair for their permanent collections, and the Cooper-Hewitt also owns a collection of models and drawings relating to the chair's development.

In the catalog for the exhibition at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, which was titled "The Chair: From Artifact to Object," curator Trevor Richardson gives context to Jackson's achievement with the Vik-ter Chair:

Between the severity of Minimalism on the one hand, and the exuberance of Memphis on the other, there emerged a new breed of designer who chose to work within the constraints of traditional design languages, while seeking new ways to enrich their existing vocabulary. Far from appearing tired and shopworn, this reworking has, in the hands of individuals such as Jonas Bohlin, Dakota Jackson and Bořek Šípek, attained a new level of refinement and sophistication.

Although the Vik-ter Chair was designed for the contract market, its popularity led Jackson to make it available to the residential market and for sale directly to buyers through the Museum of Modern Art Design Store Catalog.

The Library Chair

In 1991, Jackson began work on a chair for use in libraries and other educational institutions. Inspired by Bank of England-style office chairs, as well as by the plywood seating collections of Charles and Ray Eames, Jackson spent five years developing and testing his design for what became "The Library Chair" and one of his most ubiquitous works.

Jackson wanted to engineer a strong, comfortable wooden chair that could be mass-produced cost-effectively.

After Jackson exhibited the chair at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in 1993, Metropolitan Home described it as "simplicity itself" and observed that it marked "design's new austere mood." Metropolitan Home also recognized the Library Chair with a "Best of Show" award at the furniture fair, and Jackson received the ICFF Editors Award for Best Body of Work.

The Library Chair was first specified for the San Francisco Public Library's new Main Library location, which was designed by architect James Ingo Freed of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and the California architecture firm of Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris. The new facility opened in 1996 and required more than a thousand chairs overall, including 722 side chairs and 154 arm chairs for main reading rooms, and 165 upholstered armchairs for the Library's special collections rooms.

In 2014, in honor of Steinway's 160th anniversary, Jackson and Steinway introduced the 160th Anniversary Limited Edition Arabesque Grand Piano at Steinway Hall. The design, with twisting legs that were inspired by the Arabesque (ballet position), became the first Steinway & Sons piano to receive a Red Dot Design Award for Product Design.

Notable projects

2014, 160th Anniversary Limited Edition Arabesque Piano (Red Dot Design Award) 2007, Scatter Chair (first publicly available Dakota Jackson product) 2001, DB-1 and DB-2 Tables (exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt in 2002) 2000, Tri-Centennial Piano (first collaboration with Steinway & Sons) 2000, Dumb Box, P.A. 1999, Boutique showroom for jewelry designer David Yurman on Madison Avenue 1999, Kips Bay Show House 1998, Collaboration with architect Peter Eisenman on the Dakota Jackson Los Angeles showroom 1997, Bombay Sapphire Goblet 1996, Golder Chapel, Temple Jeremiah, Winnetka, Illinois (AIA Religious Art & Architecture Design Award) 1995, The Library Chair (acquired by the Cooper-Hewitt in 1999) 1995, The Coda Chair for Lane Home Furnishings 1992, Absolut Jackson ad for Absolut Vodka 1991, Vik-ter Chair (acquired by the Cooper-Hewitt in 1991 and the Museum of Arts and Design in 1993) 1988, Ke-zu Chaise (acquired by the Brooklyn Museum in 1990) 1984, New Classics Desk (acquired by the Brooklyn Museum in 1990) 1979, Self-Winding Cocktail Table 1976, Saturn Stool (exhibited at The Whitney in 1985 and acquired by the Brooklyn Museum in 1990) 1974, Desk for Yoko Ono and John Lennon (first major commission)

Permanent collections

Museums Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design, Chicago, IL Colorado Ski Museum, Vail, CO Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY Design Museum, London, England German Architecture Museum, Frankfurt, Germany Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Spiritmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden Wolfsonian-FIU, Miami Beach, FL

Corporate collections Nike, Inc., Beaverton, OR Bloomingdale's, New York, NY Revlon, New York, NY The Gap, Inc., San Francisco, CA Columbia Pictures, Culver City, CA Oprah Winfrey Network, Chicago, IL The Walt Disney Studios, Burbank, CA Arista Records, Inc., New York, NY Bad Boy Records, New York, NY EMI Music, London, England Four Seasons Hotel, New York, NY Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA

Public institutions San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, CA Santa Monica Public Library West Hollywood Public Library

Exhibitions 2006, "Take a Seat", Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY 2002, "Skin," curated by Ellen Lupton, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, NY 1992, "The Cooper-Hewitt Collections: A Design Resource: Designs for Seating", Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, NY 1992, "Initial Concepts: Dakota Jackson", Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, NY 1991, "Explorations II: The New Furniture," curated by John Perreault, American Craft Museum, New York, NY 1991, "The Chair: From Artifact to Object", Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 1990, "Mondo Materialis," curated by Jeffrey Osborne and George Beylerian, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, NY 1987, "The Chair Fair," organized by Architectural League of New York, International Design Center, New York, NY 1985, "High Styles: Twentieth-Century American Design," curated by Lisa Phillips, et al., The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1980, "Further Furniture," curated by Nicholas Calas, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, NY

Awards and honors 2014, Red Dot Design Award, Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen 2012, Design Icon Award, Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA 2010, AD 20/21 Lifetime Achievement Award, Boston Architectural College, Boston, MA 2006, SCAD Style Étoile Award, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA 1997, Design 100 Hall of Fame, Metropolitan Home, New York, NY 1997, Good Design Award, The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, Chicago, IL 1995, AIA Religious Art & Architecture Design Award, American Institute of Architects, Washington, D.C. 1995, ICFF Editors Award: Craftsmanship, International Contemporary Furniture Fair, New York, NY 1994, Design 100 Hall of Fame, Metropolitan Home, New York, NY 1993, ICFF Editors Award: Body of Work, International Contemporary Furniture Fair, New York, NY 1992, Annual Design Review Award, I.D., The International Design Magazine, New York, NY