Performance Artist

By: Hilary Jay

February 2008

In 1974, when Dakota Jackson was 25 years old, Yoko Ono called him to commission a desk for her husband, John Lennon. “It was a defining moment,” says Jackson, who had been living a double life since moving to New York in 1970. Born into a family of magicians and vaudeville performers, he had immersed himself in the downtown art scene. He was stopping bullets in his mouth and performing standard dove-and-handkerchief magic tricks in galleries while also studying and performing with minimalist dance groups. Simultaneously, he discovered a love for building things and was earning money by making such items as beds for artists’ lofts, apparatus for other magicians and unusual objects like birdcages large enough to hold a human. He became renowned for his ability to build anything at all.

Ono’s commission, a compact wooden desk borrowing curved lines from the Art Deco movement, was meant to be something of a Chinese puzzle. “It was the first time I merged thoughts of magic with solutions for furniture,” Jackson says. “I began thinking formally about design.” He now considered himself a designer instead of a builder. Unlike traditional furniture makers, however, he approached design much as he had approached magic. “I was intrigued with spontaneous transformation,” he says. “Magic is all about the moment of suspended belief. I took that sensibility and applied it to making objects.”

From that point forward, commissions came quickly from the well-known and wealthy: a bar for singer-songwriter Peter Allen, an executive desk for producer Lorne Michaels, a bed (“Eclipse Bed”) for fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, a media console/library for Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, a vanity for soap opera star Christine Jones.

In 1979, Jackson moved his workshop from Chelsea to Long Island City, and launched two new businesses. Still making one-of-a-kind commissions, he added antique furniture restoration and a piano factory to his repertoire. Jackson, who considers himself an accomplished pianist, bought several old instruments to restore and was developing a new prototype grand piano when his house of cards fell. With approximately 70 employees and three unique businesses to run, Jackson slipped into financial trouble. In restructuring, he had to let go of the piano and restoration ventures.

Refocusing on furniture design, Jackson took his first steps toward creating a brand name. In 1981 and 1982, he released his first line of limited-edition furniture, the New Classics Collection. Along with architects Robert Venturi and Michael Graves, Jackson was instrumental in defining and popularizing the postmodernist movement that was taking hold. The pieces, made of exotic woods, anodized aluminum, stone, glass and metals, played on illusion, tension and surprise: the glass top of a coffee table and side table that appeared to float and the wood sleeves of a dining table that could mysteriously spread out.
Jackson opened his first New York showroom in 1984, catering exclusively to interior designers and architects. Then, as now, he was in charge of design, production, sales, marketing and distribution. His business formula has served Dakota Jackson Inc. well. In 1997 Jackson opened an architecturally striking Los Angeles showroom designed in collaboration with world-class architect Peter Eisenman. Now Jackson’s line is represented by dozens of international showrooms. Over the past three decades, the company has become an industry leader in the American fine furniture market, noted for its use of exotic veneers, fine upholstery, impeccable joinery and contemporary lines that sometimes hint at other cultures or past time periods.

“Dakota is a designer who thinks architecturally, but brings a craftsman’s sensibility to his work,” says David McFadden, chief curator at New York’s Museum of Art & Design (MAD), which has Jackson’s stackable Vik-ter Chair in its permanent collection. The Library Chair, found by the thousands in university and public libraries across the country, and other iconic pieces are in collections world-wide including the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; the Design Museum in London; and the Deutsches Architektur-Museum, in Germany.

Beyond furniture, Jackson has tackled interior design projects, most notably the ark, chapel and seating for Temple Jeremiah in Winnetka, Illinois, with architect H. Gary Frank. The striking bimah (the raised platform in the synagogue from which the Torah is read) contains the ark or the symbolic cabinets that hold a Jewish congregation’s sacred scrolls. Jackson’s sanctuary, as a whole, sets the tone for both private contemplation and group prayer.

Despite his less-than-fortunate early attempt at building a piano factory, Jackson says he always felt that the piano was “unfinished business” and that at some point he would return to it. “I’ve been an active pianist on a daily basis for 50 years,” he says. The instrument has continued to fire Jackson’s imagination. “I just knew better than to go into [a piano] venture alone again.” He didn’t have to. While he was working on furniture commissions and designing lines of furniture for his growing brand, he was invited to collaborate with Steinway & Sons, both in Hamburg, Germany, and the United States, on the Tricentennial Anniversary Piano, which was released in 2000 in an edition of 300 to commemorate the company’s construction of its first piano. Priced at $85,000 per instrument, the edition has since sold out. “I think Dakota had this piano designed in his mind before he ever put a line to paper,” says Frank Mazurco, executive vice president of Steinway & Sons.

This year, in collaboration with Steinway, Jackson released the Grand Concert Piano, created for a private collector and costing $350,000. Like a coach-built car, the Grand Concert is pure performance and styling. Comparable in design to the Tricentennial, there is the streamlined simplicity and dramatic forward lean of the high-luster macassar ebony body, the rolling counterbalanced brushed brass arched music desk, the upward rotation of the serpentine topstick to support the lid, the ergonomically shaped brass lyre pedals, the conical folding of the lid. “A musical instrument, like a chair, has a provocative relationship to the body,” says Jackson. “With a piano you come to it and it toward you. How the sound moves around you, and how the body moves around the pedals is a very active event. As you open it, it teaches you about itself in an unexpected and pleasurable way.”

For his next act? A new limited edition of 20 grand pianos under his own label. “I would be happy designing nothing but pianos for the rest of my days,” he says.

 

Hilary Jay is the executive director of The Design Center at Philadelphia University.