01.29.2014
Last night after a grueling day and night of making user interface designs, I snuck this tee shirt design in for CalArts’ Graphic Design Department’s 2014 T-Shirt Show.
The annual show, in the words of alumna Thea Lorentzen from a recent issue of IDEA:
As far as traditions go, the CalArts T-shirt show is a relatively new phenomenon. The first event was held just ten years ago. Today, current students and faculty as well as alumni contribute designs that are then screen printed onto t-shirts and sold to the rest of the school, as well as visitors. The frenzy begins during t-shirt printing. For one long day, the lab fills up with design students, all with inked hands and dirty rags, ready to fold and print over 60 patterns and as many as 400 shirts. The t-shirt show and sale take place on a Thursday night during the CalArts gallery openings. Hordes of students that would normally be wandering freely through the halls actually line up to buy t-shirts and tote bags. The line can extend out from the cafeteria and back into the galleries. The t-shirt designs themselves might be simple or intricate, disgusting or humorous. Sometimes they make fun of how little sleep students get. Sometimes they announce how much we love Walt Disney. Ed Fella’s designs always sell out first. But all designs proudly bear the name of the school, and in doing so, remind us of why everyone is excited enough to wait in line.
Over 30 years ago, before he was a teacher at CalArts, Ed Fella lived in Detroit. The local arts organization made some bumper stickers that said “Ya gotta have art.” Ever the contrarian, Ed made his own bumper stickers which read, “Art is an ethnocentric cultural construct that you don’t gotta have.”
This shirt design is a Japanese localization with as much nuance applied to the meaning as possible which reads, “美術は自文化中心主義的な社会構造であり、なくてもいいものである”. The linguistic and orthographic disconnect seemed somehow appropriate, but that’s also what happens when you design something at 5am.