After 25 years as artist, cartoonist and Pee-wee’s Playhouse puppet master, Wayne White returns to Middle Tennessee

Like a lot of people in the art world, Wayne White has a big head. A really big head. Fifteen feet big, to be exact.

The nose alone, sculpted from a mound of Styrofoam, runs close to 5 feet. Tubular hairs sprout above the massive brow like giant French fries bursting from a box. The hinged nutcracker mouth creaks open, capable of swallowing watermelons whole, while eyes the size of basketballs rotate in their sockets.

But the face isn't White's. It's a likeness of George Jones, commissioned by Houston's Rice University Art Gallery for a site-specific show that opened in September. The installation had received so much attention by mid-month that word eventually reached the man himself. To White, the George Jones who called him on the phone to express his gratitude was scarcely smaller than the sculpture.

"It was better than The Beatles," White says by telephone from his home in Los Angeles.

The irony in this is that Wayne White's work, in many ways, is a reaction against the tyranny of the swelled head. He honed his career in a culture snob's idea of the bush leagues: cartoons, puppet shows, children's TV. As an artist, he invokes pomp for purely comic effect, outfitting humble items such as thrift-store paintings with imposingly grandiose text elements. The guy's now the subject of a lavish monograph—the kind of career-capping coffee-table brick most artists lust for—and yet its title mocks just that sort of hubris: Maybe Now I'll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve.

Maybe. But White is one of those rare figures who's managed to hold onto his cutting-edge cred even while paddling in the mainstream. A kid from a small town outside Chattanooga with a state-university art education, White left Middle Tennessee to become a widely published cartoonist, an Emmy-winning set designer, and in the most recent turn of his career a sought-after artist and sculptor.

But even people who've followed White throughout each of these phases—from the characters he devised for the hugely influential late-1980s children's show Pee-wee's Playhouse to the Georges Melies-influenced sets he designed for the Smashing Pumpkins' blockbuster "Tonight, Tonight" video—may be startled by the range, energy and artistic development they show when placed side by side in Maybe Now I'll Get the Respect I So Richly Deserve. A labor of love assembled by no less a figure than Todd Oldham, the famed designer whose Southern background, brawny work ethic and spirit of play dovetail with his subject's, the almost psychedelically colorful 382-page retrospective makes a case for White (in Oldham's words) as "an artistic shapeshifter" whose oeuvre resembles "an old master from another galaxy."

In some ways, White is "a true Nashville story," says Lambchop lead singer Kurt Wagner, who's tapped White's work for several album covers. That story is a mixed blessing—an enormous talent who can realize his potential only by striking out for somewhere else. "That's just the way Nashville is," Wagner says. "The only way to try to better yourself is to leave. We went through that with Lambchop. Sure enough, it is a bigger world out there."

Local audiences will see the book and White next weekend when he does a string of Tennessee appearances culminating Oct. 10 at the Southern Festival of Books. For the artist, it'll be a homecoming to the site of his college years and the company of friends and fellow artists whom he counts as enormous influences. That they're known to few outside his creative circle matters not at all. In Wayne White's work, there is no hierarchy of high and low art, of celebrity and anonymity. This is, after all, the story of a guy who walked into The Great Escape in 1980, made a single purchase, and changed the course of his life.

That purchase was an issue of RAW, the highbrow comics anthology published by Art Spiegelman before his success with the Maus graphic novels. Since childhood, cartooning had been one of White's passions: He'd been the school cartoonist in his hometown of Hixson, Tenn., just outside Chattanooga. As a kid, he says, he couldn't wait to hit the drugstore each month to get the latest comic books.

"I loved Superman comics, and those were of course all anonymously drawn," White says, singling out "Silver Age" Superman artist Curt Swan as a favorite. "And of course the Mad cartoonists—Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Al Jaffee, Dave Berg, Mort Drucker, Sergio Aragones."

The son of a former DuPont worker, a onetime high school athlete who married his cheerleader sweetheart, White admittedly spent a lot of his own high school years raising hell, in that peculiarly toxic small-town Southern fashion born of testosterone and boredom. He wanted out of Hixson. His sister had gone off to MTSU in Murfreesboro, and White followed her there in the late '70s just as the burgeoning punk and new wave subculture began to percolate in the sleepy college town. The energy surged in MTSU's art department, housed in a dairy barn on the far side of the campus.