Pedro Bell

Who is 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.