In the mid-1990s, when his band wasn’t touring, Jeff Nelson would work at local coffee shops. He was, he admits, “just OK” at making coffee, but quickly found a knack for designing the shop’s menu chalkboards.
At first, he just considered the task to be a creative bright spot in an otherwise uninspiring day job. But then he received a call from another cafe wanting him to do their chalkboards. And then another.
“It was kind of like Instagram before there was Instagram, because your portfolio was there for anyone with a low-grade caffeine addiction,” he said. “And word has it that lots of people in food service like coffee.”
At some point in the early 2000s, he said, the scales tipped: The requests he was getting for menu board gigs were keeping him just as busy as the coffee shop job. The decision of which path to pursue “was a no-brainer,” he said.
Now, under the moniker “Jephemera,” Nelson works full-time from a studio in the Lowertown Underground Artists cooperative, a basement space on Prince Street founded by artists like Nelson who formerly had studios in the Jax Building before it was converted to apartments.
Nelson’s handiwork regularly announces what’s new at places like Cooks of Crocus Hill, Subtext Books and The French Hen Cafe. He drew the wall of flavor signs for Grand Ole Creamery’s outpost inside what’s now known as Grand Casino Arena, and this year, he designed signage for the St. Paul Farmers Market’s new indoor space.
His work shows up in other formats, too, from magazine covers to beer cans to building walls, including the floral mural he painted behind Grand Avenue art shop Wet Paint in 2019. For the past couple years, he has created map guides for theater company Wonderlust Productions’ interactive Hidden Herald audio storytelling project.
Speaking of maps: When Nelson isn’t working on client projects, he creates extraordinarily detailed maps — but not of places that exist in real life. They’re mostly not even places at all: One, “The Glorious Island of Cheese,” imagines every ‘country’ on a fictional island as a variety of cheese with ‘cities’ marked as suggested pairings. Other maps break down the famed 23 flavors in Dr. Pepper soda and visually organize favorite albums from artists like Weezer, They Might Be Giants and Tom Waits.
In college, he said, he’d format his class notes as maps.
“It’s a way of cataloguing taxonomical information in a visual kind of way,” he said. “Everything’s kind of a taxonomy when you get down to it. You have a big body of knowledge and you drill it down to the smaller parts.”
Nelson, in his classic cheekily self-deprecating way, denies he’s an artist. No, he says: He’s an illustrator. Or maybe, in a way, a translator.
“I really only have, like, three really good original ideas a year,” he joked. “I really love working with other people who have something they need to get out there in a visual way. It’s a ton of fun to work with people who have something they care a lot about and to be able to put that into a visual medium.”
But, as the name “Jephemera” implies, the work he creates for businesses around town is ephemeral. It’s meant to be temporary. When it’s time to roll out new specials, Nelson’s work disappears beneath a fresh coat of black paint.
“It’s really freeing to work in a medium that’s not meant to be forever,” he said. “It’s fun to be part of that madness. If people want to change things up completely, we change it up completely. People are much more willing to play around when it’s a medium like a chalkboard.”
Related Articles
Made in St. Paul: Stories of Native history, culture and basketball from TPT filmmaker Leya Hale
Made in St. Paul: On and off the Fairgrounds, Lip Esteem aims to build community with lipstick
Leave a Reply