I started working on the Alfredo Avella collection during the student placement for my MSc in Museum Studies at University of Glasgow and returned after finishing my dissertation so I could finish cataloguing it.
Alfredo Avella, born in Italy in 1924, started taking evening classes at the GSA in his twenties. He studied Stained Glass, graduating in 1965, and was made an associate of British Society of Master Glass Painters the following year. Avella was an instructor at GSA for fourteen years until his death in 1982, a full-time lecturer in the Stained Glass and Murals department for thirteen of those, but also a working artist taking private and civic commissions.When I first started my placement, it was unclear how big the collection would turn out to be; as I did my first look through it to try and get a sense of what I would be working with, I discovered that inside the boxes and files in which it was donated there were often multiple items tucked into each other or packed into envelopes. They were full of not only artwork and teaching notes, but correspondence, photographs and ephemera. As well as hundreds of these small 2D items, the collection contained a handful of 3D maquettes of planned installations and some full-size cartoons (designs for a stained glass window) which were so large they needed two people to roll them out onto tables.
That said, the diversity of the collection is one of its major strengths as a resource. The correspondence gives a lot of insight into the life of a working artist in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, containing a number of exchanges between Avella and potential clients, often in the form of letters to Avella (sometimes with his notes for a response written on the back) addressing a suggestion, price estimate or design included in his previous letter. In the case of a correspondence with a Lieutenant Colonel Russell for a planned stained glass window for a military building, we can even see the approved designs Avella had sent, as Russell ultimately returned them when the project was scrapped.
In his work designing stained glass and mural pieces for clients, Avella collaborated with his wife Dympna Foy Avella and several designs in this collection are signed with both of their names. Dympna, who worked under her maiden name Foy, also taught at the children’s classes at GSA. Avella’s style is modernist and generally abstract, using bold geometric forms and highly-saturated colours. There are some more figurative pieces in this collection, including a set of full-size cartoons of the Stations of the Cross, but all are recognisably stylised. One of the defining traits of Avella’s work is the use of thick black boundary lines, likely as result of his extensive work with stained glass and leading. This collection contains artworks in sketch and finished forms, across a number of mediums, as well as photographs of artworks after installation and while under construction (many of these feature the Bruce Hotel in East Kilbride, for which Avella created a number of interior and exterior art pieces in the 1960s). Images of Avella’s work also exist amongst the projector slides in this collection, which had all been digitised before I started my placement.
The breadth of this collection made for a particularly interesting cataloguing experience, as it not only gave insight into the full life cycle of a project as undertaken by Avella (in the case of his heraldic window for the Scottish Police Federation building, for example, the collection contains commission correspondence, preliminary sketches, a full-size cartoon and slide pictures of the finished and installed window) but also into various elements of his day-to-day working life outside of the actual creation of artwork. Teaching notes, invoices from suppliers, minutes of GSA meetings, orders of service from churches where his work was being unveiled and a caricature drawn by GSA colleague Danny Ferguson all contribute to a fuller sense of Avella’s career than could be gained from his work alone. The number and variety of items included in the Alfredo Avella collection allow for an unusually clear snapshot of an artist’s work outside of and alongside their art.
