Sarah Boris, Ficciones Typografika 225–227 (72”x36”). Installed on February 6, 2014. Photo: Erik Brandt

Erik Brandt, Ficciones Typografika, 641–643 (72”x36”). Installed on September 6, 2014. Anagram created in discussion with Elisabeth Workman following gun violence in Minneapolis. Photo: Paul Schmelzer

Matthew Rezac, Ficciones Typografika 559–561 (72”x36”). Installed on July 10, 2014. Photo: Erik Brandt

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Back Alley Poster Show: Designer Erik Brandt’s World-Famous Garage Gallery

In Minnesota on a 20-below-zero day, Erik Brandt is certainly not alone in his liberal use of windshield-wiper fluid to stave off ice formation. But he’s not using it on his windshield.

For the past 15 months, Brandt, a professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, has been curating an outdoor poster show by an array of global graphic design innovators. He’s featured work by icons, iconoclastic young phenoms, and little-known student talents alike, mixing names likes Ed Fella, Shiraz Gallab, Felix Pfäffli, Reza Abedini, Janneke Meekes, and Terrell Davis.

Brandt’s gallery is a 36 x 72-inch panel on the side of his garage in Minneapolis’ Powderhorn Park neighborhood, a humble space that every Friday counts among its visitors the stinking truck that clatters by to haul off garbage.

Read more on Erik Brandt's Ficciones Typografika project at re:form, published September 17, 2014, and in a 2019 interview on the Walker Art Center’s design blog, The Gradient, reprinted from the Formist Editions monograph Ficciones Typografika: 1642.