11. Goodbye To All That (or, some personal news)

Hi!

It’s me, Jarrett Fuller and this is my newsletter. You’re getting it because at some point in the last few years, you signed up to recieve updates from me about my work and interests. I’m glad you are here. I have a bad habit of burying the lede so let’s get right to it:

Despite the subject line, this update will not be about why I am leaving New York …but I am leaving New York! 😳

I’m excited to announce that I’ve accepted a position at North Carolina State University as an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and this summer my family and I will be relocating from our home in Brooklyn to Raleigh, NC!

As you probably know, my work has increasingly focused on education over the last five years and I started to feel like to really be an influence in this space, I needed to make the jump from part-time to full-time. I was weighing options from a few different institutions but ultimately couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be at NCSU. Their design department is one I’ve admired for years and many educators and thinkers who have influenced me have taught there (Andrew Blauvelt, Martha Scotford, Meredith Davis). Their emphasis on scholarship, research, and design pedagogy is nearly unparalleled. To step into this place, and be a part of its history, feels like a special opportunity where I can both learn from the smart people already there and hopefully bring this weird career I’ve assembled for myself to serve a new community. This is also the first full-time gig I’ve had in…6 years?? So I’m kinda nervous about that!

My time teaching at Pratt, Parsons, and UArts the last few years has been a highlight of my professional life. I’ve lost count of the friends I’ve made, the things I’ve learned, and the insights I’ve gleaned. I would not be here today, doing the work I’m doing, if it wasn’t for the many, many people I’ve gotten to work alongside — both faculty and students — the last four years. I’m going miss them so much.

There’s more to say but for now I’ll just add how tough a decision this was, both professionally and personally. We were interested in living outside of New York and experiencing a different part of the country. I’m sad to leave this city (I was not sad to leave it the first time I left but it still pulled me back) but looking forward to exploring our new city, having a yard, and easy access to both the ocean and a mountains. If you have suggestions for places to check out in Raleigh, send them my way.

Thank you, as always, for following along on this adventure.

In addition to prepping a big move, I’ve also:

• finished teaching classes at Parsons and Pratt, a bittersweet end to my tenure at both of those schools but what is also hopefully the last semester of teaching on Zoom.
• released a handful of Scratching the Surface episodes including great conversations with Deyan Sudjic, Mike Essl, Beatrice Galilee, and Dori Tunstall. I’ve been recording episodes for the summer too and have some fun ones coming up.
• begun to wrap up a new story for Eye on Design that will hopefully be published at the end of this month.
• commissioned and published stories on the conceptual architecture practice Ant Farm, a new crowdsourced archive of design history, and the history of cultural design in Porto, Portugal.
• laying ground work for some summer projects including a large-scale typographic installation that I’m excited about.
• I’ve found myself doing more consulting work around strategy, editorial, and publishing for design-related publications. These conversations have been fun! I’d love to do more of them!

I do have limited availability for new projects this summer, so if you’re looking for design work — primarily books but I also do websites, branding, and content production — or editorial strategy, get in touch!

The book that has stuck with me the most in the last month is Mark Doty’s meditative Still life with Oysters and Lemon, a lyrical memoir that uses early Renaissance still-life paintings to examine questions of memory, love, death, and time. In a passage I keep coming back to, Doty writes:

We’re accustomed to not seeing what is so near to us; we do not need to look at things that are at hand, because they are at hand every day. That is what makes home so safe and so appealing, that we do not need to look at it. Novelty recedes, in the face of the daily, and we’re free to relax, to drift, to focus inward.

This, in many ways, speaks to the current condition, stuck in our homes the last year through a pandemic. We were forced to reconsider the familiar — the familiar, perhaps, becoming unfamiliar — as we saw our environments in new ways, to truly see them again.

This happened in our physical spaces but it also happened with how we experience time. As I’ve written before, time both slowed down and sped up, it feels like this year didn’t happen and that it’s gone on forever. I really enjoyed this short, simple video essay on the famous scene from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia of a man walking with a lit candle. Tarkovsky immediately felt like the filmmaker who best captured the pandemic and quarantine for me but I had completely forgotten Nostalghia, the film of his I’ve seen the least. It’s clearly time for a rewatch.

I also recently finished Lauren Oyler’s much-hyped Fake Accounts and I am here to tell you: it lives up to it! Oyler is perhaps better known as fierce literary critic — writing viral takedowns of people like Jia Tolentino, Roxanne Gay, and Sally Rooney — so her first novel had people, I think, hoping for payback. Turns out Oyler is too good — the novel is wildly funny, twisty, and captures this moment in an unusual way. The top-line summary is that a New York blogger discovers her boyfriend is a popular online conspiracy theorist so she moves to Berlin assumes different personas on dating profiles, creating other lives much like her boyfriend. Trust me, that barely covers everything. Highly recommended.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, I realize I’m a year late to this but Winds of Change, the podcast from journalist Patrick Radden Keefe might be the best podcast mini-series I’ve ever listened to. Through eight episodes, Radden Keefe tries to get to the bottom of a rumor he heard that the famous 1989 Scorpions song Winds of Change was actually a piece of CIA propaganda created to help end the cold war. It’s a great piece of journalism that twists and turns and asks big questions around the nature of conspiracies, cultural production, and the power of art.

I’ve been head-over-heals for Amy Shark’s new album, Cry Forever, which feels like what a Taylor Swift and Lorde collaboration would sound like. (The new albums from Dry Cleaning, girl in red, and Leon Vynhall have also been on heavy rotation.)

Here are two movie recs for you, one old and one to new (but both new to me): The Booksellers is a sweet documentary about antiquarian book dealers in New York and exactly what an aspiring bibliophile like myself loves watching. Turns out all book dealers are both not what you are expecting and exactly what you are expecting. The 1982 film Eating Raoul had been in my queue forever (at least a year, I bet) and I finally watched it a few weekends ago. Let me tell you: what a film this it! I don’t want to spoil anything so let me just say this was hilarious and goofy and not at all what I expected. When you get the title, you’ll laugh out loud.

Do read this NYT profile of Seth Rogen and immediately feel better. Or maybe this inside look at James Turrell’s Roden Crater is more your thing. Also in the New York Times, I loved this story on Jo van Gogh-Bonger, Vincent van Gogh’s sister-in-law who is the single reason why we know who van Gogh is today. (Irving Stone’s biographical novel about van Gogh, Lust for Life, is one of my all-time favorite books and one I re-read every few years. Do you know it? You should.)

I think it’s time for me to take some time off before the move. As always, I’d love to hear from you — simply hit reply to this email if you have thoughts, comments, questions, or want to chat.

Until next time,

JF