22 Facts About Dakota Jackson

Dakota Jackson was born on August 24,1949 and is an American furniture designer known for his eponymous furniture brand, Dakota Jackson, Inc.

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

Dakota Jackson began studying magic at a young age and sometimes performed with his father.

In 1963, Dakota Jackson began to perform in talent shows at his junior high school, William Cowper JHS 73, and at children's birthday parties.

Dakota Jackson 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.

When he was 17, Dakota Jackson had studied with magician Jack London to learn the dangerous bullet catch trick.

Dakota Jackson didn't find the opportunity to perform the trick publicly until a decade later at Jackson's final professional performance as a magician.

Dakota Jackson admits that he sometimes tires of references to his magician background, although he acknowledges it as an important part of his history.

Dakota 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, Dakota Jackson performed with the Japanese group Tokyo Kid Brothers at New York's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in a rock musical production called "Coney Island Play".

Dakota Jackson began making a variety of objects, including furnishings for other artists and magic boxes with hidden compartments for art collectors and galleries.

Commissions like these continued to come in and Dakota Jackson soon became known as a designer to the rich and famous.

Dakota Jackson showed a variety of industrial-looking lacquer, metal, and glass works at Art et Industrie, including his Standing Bar, a lacquered cabinet that Dakota Jackson designed in 1978 for his wife RoseLee Goldberg.

Dakota Jackson called this body of work the Deadly Weapons series.

Dakota Jackson has often stated that he was inspired by industrialists like Andrew Carnegie to increase production output and create designs that could be manufactured in multiple.

When he started building in the early 1970s, Dakota Jackson was able to complete six pieces a year with the help of a single assistant.

The move to Long Island City allowed Dakota Jackson to set up a design studio that was part atelier and part factory.

The first collection based on this assembly line approach was the New Classics, which Dakota Jackson introduced for the residential furniture market in 1983.

In 1989, Dakota Jackson entered the mass-produced contract furniture market with the Ke-zu seating collection, which started with an "angular" chaise longue and grew to include a range of leather-covered arm chairs, side chairs, club chairs, ottomans, and sofas.

In 1991, Jackson introduced the "biomorphic" Vik-ter Stacking Chair at the third annual International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Jacob K Javits Convention Center in Manhattan.

In 1991, Dakota Jackson began work on a chair for use in libraries and other educational institutions.

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