APRIL 1st FOOLISHISTS
Edward Fella
Edward Fella: APRIL 1st FOOLISHISTS [event title]. New York: Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, 2002. Original edition. 11 x 17 event flyer/mailer, but folded into sixths. SIGNED by Edward Fella. Tiny red/yellow color ink spot to one side [or it might be mustard. . . ] An unmailed, lightly handled, very good example.
11 x 17 flyer designed by Edward Fella to announce an event sponsored by the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and held at the Fashion Institute of Technology to celebrate Edward Fella, Lorraine Wild, and John Maeda’s nomination for a National Design Award in the field of Communication Design.
"Edward Fella, a former commercial artist, creates posters that break every known rule of typographic convention and designer good taste," says Rick Poynor. Ellen Lupton has written, "In Fella's work, the unfettered mind of a Dada/Fluxus hippie confronts the dextrous hand of a traditional commercial artist." Bruce Mau calls him "brilliant." Peter Hall says Ed Fella is "an agitator, an experimentalist, an educator, and an inspiration to a new generation of type designers" and says his "anti-slick, rule-breaking designs" are "eccentric to the point of being impossible to imitate." Clearly everyone agrees that Ed Fella is one of the most daring and extreme graphic designers in America today. Famous for his obsessive hand-drawn alphabets and glyphs, Fella creates work with the power and spontaneity of raw art that nonetheless is born from a great knowledge of the theory and technique of typography and graphics. As Rick Poynor says, "Fella doesn't so much take his line for a walk as force-feed it hallucinogens and release it babbling on to the page."
"Fella became something of a legend in the graphic design world over a decade ago after coming out of the closet of commercial art. His main body of work, scores and scores of posters produced for art galleries and cultural venues, suggests he is a naif, although nothing is further from the truth. He is, however, an iconoclast. Fella worked for almost three decades as a bullpen “commercial artist” in the Motor City doing everything from designing brochures to drawing illustrations, some for the automobile industry. He was not a “star,” although he did get a few pieces into art director annuals. Then one day, this journeyman gave up his job and enrolled in graduate school – the Cranbrook Academy – and started making hand-hewn graphics that echoed Dada, Futurism, Surrealism but combined these anarchic traits in a stew of ragged, jagged, and chaotic personal expression. In addition to his studies, Fella also taught. Through his unique blend of homespun practicality and theoretical discourse he was an inspiration to his fellow students. Today he asserts he is retired from the commercial art business, although he continues to make posters and when asked letters certain jobs. Indeed lettering is his painting. (At my request he did rendered word-illustrations for the 1999 special Summer issue of the New York Times Book Review, some of which are reproduced in this volume). He’s further devoted himself to teaching at CalArts, which allows him time to roam the country as a kind of Jack Kerouac of the graphic culture.
"The scrawls and letterforms recorded in Fella’s pictures are indeed primitive. He ignores the professional, just as he rejected his own professional career. But he is aware that in recent years primitivism has become an antidote to slick professionalism. In fact, Primitivism has become its own professional style. Yet Fella stands against the trend. He savors these artifacts for their inherent honest beauty and gutsy rawness. If the book teaches anything it is that respect is a major component of his obsession. To copy or mimic this stuff would be disrespectful, it would be exploitation. There is no ulterior motive here, no pretense. This is not a “cool” book compiled simply to showcase the author’s coolness. Neither is it a masturbatory exercise that draws attention to the author’s ego like the recent crop of “designer/artist books.” Letters on America documents a world that we see but don’t see. It focuses on his individual relationship to the virtues of this world." -- Stephen Heller