page_title: Dakota Jackson
section_title: The American Art Furniture Movement and the Industrial Style
hierarchical_section_title: Dakota Jackson / Design career / The American Art Furniture Movement and the Industrial Style
caption_attribution_description: The Saturn Stool by Dakota Jackson
context_page_description: Dakota Jackson 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.
  Jackson helped establish the art furniture movement in 1970s SoHo, 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.
context_section_description: In the late 1970s, Jackson was among a small group of artists and artisans producing and exhibiting hand-made furniture in New York. 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, Art et Industrie, founded by Rick Kaufmann in 1976.
  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 works on display were "radical objects" that drew from a number of fine art traditions, including "Pop, Surrealism, Pointillism and Dada [which were] "thrown together with the severe lines of the Bauhaus and the Russian avant-garde, mixed with Mondrian's color and filtered through a video sensibility—all to create a new statement." The article described Jackson as a "ten-year veteran of the genre" and pointed to the "clean forms and quiet colors" of his furniture.
  Jackson showed a variety of industrial-looking lacquer, metal, and glass works at Art et Industrie, including his Standing Bar (also known as the Modern Bar), a lacquered cabinet that Jackson designed in 1978 for his wife (then-girlfriend) RoseLee Goldberg.
  Other works from this period include the T-Bird Desk, Self-Winding Cocktail Table, and the Saturn Stool, which became one of Jackson's most recognizable works after being included in exhibitions at The Whitney, the International Design Center, and the American Craft Museum (now known as the Museum of Arts and Design), and in advertisements for Diane von Fürstenberg and Calvin Klein.
  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. In 1984, the New York Times described the connection between the fighter jet and another of Jackson's Deadly Weapons designs, the B1 Desk: "Like the airplane, whose wings shift in flight, the desk has parts that slide open and unfold, including a secret compartment."
  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."
caption: The Saturn Stool by Dakota Jackson
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "1650", "Image ImageLength": "1275", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "150", "Image YResolution": "150", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CC 2014 (Macintosh)", "Image DateTime": "2015:08:25 22:24:09", "Image ExifOffset": "236", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "386", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "3679", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1178", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1178"}