Pedro Bell

Pedro Bell is an American artist and illustrator. He is best known for his elaborate cover designs and other artwork for numerous Funkadelic and George Clinton solo albums. Pedro's dual conceptuality as a writer heavily contributed to P- Funk's literary mythology — a sampling of his contributions include "Thumpasaurus," "Funkapus," "Queen Freakalene," "Bop Gun," and "Zone of Zero Funkativity."

According to his biography via George Clinton’s official website, Bell’s “stream-of-contagion text rewrote the whole game. He single-handedly defined the P-Funk collective as sci-fi superheroes fighting the ills of the heart, society, and the cosmos…As much as Clinton’s lyrics, Pedro Bell’s crazoid words created the mythos of the band and bonded the audience together.”

Bell, as an “untrained” artist, created album artwork and liner notes that created discourses that were important to black people in the U.S. during the 1970s. Whether in his use of puns, hypersexual characters, Bell created conceptual art that produced alternative ways of envisioning the ways in which black people in the U.S. saw themselves, as well as spoke about themselves.

Warner Brothers Music censored Bell’s initial artwork for Funkadelic’s 1981 album The Electric Spanking of War Babies. Deemed as inappropriate due to the cover featuring an overtly phallic shaped spaceship that transported a naked woman, the work was edited, despite the fact that Funkadelic “…was following up two consecutive million-selling records,” while signed to Warner Bros. Ultimately, Bell’s art for The Electric Spanking of War Babies was featured with a lime-green sketch of shape covering the majority of the cover art, which says, “Oh Look! The Cover that ‘They’ were TOO-SCARED to print!” Recently, the CD version of the album was reproduced with its original album artwork.

In January 1994, artist and publisher Turtel Onli featured Bell as a guest artist at the Second Annual Black Age of Comics Convention presented by Onli Studios at the historic South Side Community Art Center in the Bronzeville district of Chicago, Illinois. This feature included Bell's artwork being on display in the gallery and Bell being the featured artist in a local cable televised interview covering the event. Onli also featured Bell at "BLACK AGE X" Convention in Chicago in 2007.

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