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2007 AIGA MEDAL
In response to F. Scott Fitzgerald's declaration that in
American lives there are no second acts, memoirist Frank McCourt
writes: “He simply did not live long enough.” Like the author of
Angela's Ashes, who followed a high-school teaching career
by winning the Pulitzer Prize and international fame, Ed Fella's
second act has been more noteworthy than his first. After three
decades as a successful commercial artist, Fella, at age 47,
entered the MFA program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1985,
opening the door for him to be recognized as a pioneer of
postmodern graphic design. From his subsequent position as a
professor at California Institute of the Arts, where he has
profoundly impacted the design program for the past 20 years, Fella
has since presided as vanguard master to a new generation of
graphic designers.
Over the years, Fella has created a body of work that's as
compelling as it is unique. Prodigiously mashing up low-culture
sources with high-culture erudition, Fella's work—perhaps more than
that of any other contemporary designer—makes visible the
postmodern concept of deconstruction, which recognizes that behind
every articulated meaning is a host of other, usually repressed
meanings, some antithetical. By battering and mixing fonts,
engaging in visual puns and generally violating the tenets of “good
design,” Fella lets a thousand flowers bloom. His designs don't cut
through the clutter—they revel in it.
“Ed's work marks a sea change in graphic design,” says Lorraine
Wild, a 2006 AIGA medalist. “He introduced ambivalence and
ambiguity, the multiple meanings of design as text and subtext, and
that graphic designers are really artists.”
On the surface, there is little in Fella's background to suggest he
would become one of the most influential designers of the last
quarter century. Born into a working-class family in Detroit, he
attended the local magnet school, Cass Technical High School, where
he studied lettering, illustration, paste-up and other
commercial-art techniques. After graduating in 1957, he went
straight to work as an apprentice at a small firm that provided
studio services to the Motor City's vibrant, though hardly
adventurous, advertising industry. Fella worked steadily into the
mid-1980s, freelancing primarily for automotive and health-care
clients. His pieces were included in design annuals here and there.
Of his commercial career, he's frequently quoted as saying, “I was
the vernacular.”
Yet behind the portfolio of advertising hackwork was a creative
spirit that ultimately came to the fore. From the beginning, Fella
read voraciously. As a young adult he took night classes on modern
literature and other intellectual subjects. He collected all kinds
of music as well as pop-culture ephemera. He was (and still is) a
prolific photographer. He subscribed to numerous magazines of art
and culture. “He had a curiosity about everything,” says Nelson
Greer, a design instructor at College for Creative Studies in
Detroit who worked with Fella in the 1960s and '70s.
Even his high-school-level education, which eventually limited his
career path, set the stage for later development. “Cass Tech taught
the Bauhaus foundation method, where the art schools at the time in
Detroit were steeped in the Beaux Arts,” Fella says. “So I actually
got a more advanced education in high school than I would have had
I gone to college at that point.” One of those lessons was the
Bauhaus credo of eliminating the line between the so-called fine
and applied arts.
The work for which Fella is now known has its roots in his
freelance days. Like other freelancers in between assignments,
Fella created samples of different techniques as part of soliciting
clients. Coupling mechanically reproduced material with
considerable drawing and lettering skills, Fella created intricate
and often whimsical collages for his portfolio. Photocopiers, which
had become office fixtures, expanded the possibilities for imagery
and composition. Many of these early pieces feature enigmatic
messages, a result of incorporating leftover bits of type into the
design in a parody of the “greeking” used in font books and in
comprehensive layouts. Experimental personal work soon became his
true passion.
It was during this period in the early 1970s that the planets
aligned and Fella met the two people who would become instrumental
in his move toward becoming an “exit-level designer,” his favored
term. At Designers and Partners in downtown Detroit, the lives of
Katherine McCoy, Lorraine Wild and Fella intersected. McCoy, a 1999
AIGA medalist, recalls how he shaped his situation at the bustling
agency. “Ed in effect conducted a daily symposium at lunch, in the
break room and after hours in the bar downstairs,” she says. “We
all learned an incredible amount.” Wild, who joined as an intern in
1973, notes that while many designers in the studio talked about
design and avidly collected it, Fella was the only one making new
work: “Ed was already sophisticated before he went to Cranbrook.”
Just how innovative was his work? Even before Adobe had figured out
how to kern digital fonts, Fella was deconstructing lines of copy,
modifying typefaces (turning Bembo into Bimbo by hacking off the
serifs, to cite one example) and jumbling them up. Not for another
decade would desktop publishing achieve anywhere near the
eye-bending effects Fella was getting with copy-camera photostats
and X-Acto knives. McCoy, who left Designers and Partners in 1971
to head up Cranbrook's design department with her husband Michael,
an industrial designer, invited Fella to present his work to her
students and offer critiques over a decade before he enrolled there
in the master's program. “If anyone is meant to be a student and
teacher in a rigorous educational environment, it's Ed Fella. He
was a powerful influence on our students,” she says.
The burgeoning alternative arts scene in the late 1970s and early
1980s provided an ideal venue for Fella to take his work from the
private sphere into the public domain. The posters, catalogs and
other collateral he made for various nonprofit arts
organizations—especially Detroit Focus Gallery—cemented Fella's
reputation, and to this day form the foundation for his more recent
work. Ironically, the presumably more sophisticated art world
hasn't always appreciated Fella's groundbreaking designs—in fact,
many of the artists whose shows he “promoted” have been among his
most vociferous critics. Fella may have the last word, since those
lesser known artists don't have their work in the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City, but he does.
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