Jack White to Debut His Artwork at Newport Street Gallery This May

American musician Jack White to debut his artwork to the public for the first time this spring at Newport Street Gallery in London. Titled These Thoughts May Disappear, the exhibition will run from May 29 through September 13 and will include sculptures, interactive works, installations, and furniture design. The exhibition has been arranged in association with HENI.

Best known as the guitarist and lead vocalist of the rock duo The White Stripes, White has long worked across creative disciplines. While his music career brought him international recognition, he has also maintained a parallel practice rooted in craft, design, and hands-on experimentation with materials. Much of that output has remained largely private over the past two decades, making the upcoming exhibition the first opportunity for audiences to encounter this body of work in a gallery setting.

The show will take place at Newport Street Gallery, the South London institution founded by British artist Damien Hirst. Since opening in 2015, the gallery has hosted exhibitions drawn from Hirst’s own collection as well as projects connected to artists working across disciplines. White’s presentation continues that approach, situating his work within a wider conversation around making, material experimentation, and contemporary artistic practice.

Born in Detroit in 1975 and now based in Nashville, White’s visual work is shaped by the cultural and industrial landscape of his hometown. The city’s artistic history, particularly the experimental spirit of Detroit’s Cass Corridor artists, including Gordon Newton and Robert Sestok, plays a significant role in informing his practice. His work also draws from the geometric clarity of movements such as De Stijl and the irreverent experimentation of Dada.

White often refers to his approach as “Hardware Store Art,” a phrase that reflects his use of everyday materials and tools. His works combine carpentry, upholstery, assemblage, and the reappropriation of found objects, often incorporating resins, paints, epoxy, and utilitarian materials. Rather than carving into a single material, many of his sculptures are constructed outward and upward through accumulation, emphasizing addition rather than reduction while maintaining a minimalist sensibility.

Among the central works on view will be a new version of White’s 2015 sculpture The Red Tree, which transforms a dying tree into a sculptural object by coating it in oil-based fire-engineered exterior paint. As the tree slowly decays, the work gradually changes form. Other works incorporate tools, weapons, household equipment suspended in epoxy, along with planks of wood painted in alternating stripes of black, goldenrod, cherry red, electric green, and cerulean. In one installation, White gathers what appear to be orange traffic markers into a cone-shaped arrangement mounted on a wooden pallet, evoking the structure of a bonfire.

That focus on craft and making dates back to the early years of White’s career. In 1996 he opened his own shop, Third Man Upholstery, in Detroit, developing a hands-on relationship with materials that continues to inform his work today. Many of the pieces in the exhibition reflect that background, incorporating tools, weapons, household equipment, and other found objects into sculptural constructions that highlight the material history of everyday objects.

While White’s music career remains central to his public identity, his interest in visual culture has long extended into design, craft, and material experimentation. Through Third Man Records, the vinyl-focused independent label he founded in 2001, White has explored photography, graphic design, interior architecture, printing, and industrial objects, shaping a broader creative ecosystem that extends beyond music production.

The exhibition at Newport Street Gallery brings this wider practice into focus for the first time, revealing a body of work shaped by the same DIY ethos and curiosity about materials that has defined White’s music. As White remarked in a 2018 interview with The Guardian, artists should resist the temptation to follow familiar paths. “As an artist it is your job not to take the easy way out. I want to be turned on when I listen to an artist speak: I want them to show something that no one else is doing.”

The exhibition ultimately marks the moment Jack White to Debut His Artwork publicly for the first time, revealing a visual practice that has developed quietly alongside his music career.

With These Thoughts May Disappear, White introduces audiences to a visual practice that has developed quietly alongside his musical career for decades, one grounded in craft, experimentation, and an enduring commitment to making things by hand.