Ed Fella: Collage

In 2022, the graphic designer and artist Ed Fella sent Glenn Suokko an unexpected gift: two collages cut from the back of a discarded thrift-store painting. Nine more followed, each built from fragments of the same canvas—patched, worn, and repurposed into small, quietly abstract landscapes. Fella titled the project “Glenn’s Vermont,” after the paintings and gallery aesthetic that had inspired it. Ed Fella: Collage presents the complete series for the first time: eleven works made from salvaged canvas by one of graphic design’s most influential and least categorizable figures. Across the series, the finished front of the original painting and its raw, discolored back sit side by side, their ragged, hand-cut edges holding a dialogue between old and new, naïve and intentional—the material of painting itself repurposed as collage. A commercial artist for three decades before reinventing himself at forty-seven, Fella helped move design from Modernism toward Postmodernism and taught at CalArts until his retirement in 2013. A gift, reconsidered as a body of work.