FOIAWEAR — EDNA ANDRADE / From the OSS to Op Art Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 025

An artist who spent the war making propaganda and maps for spies — then helped invent Op Art.

Edna Andrade grew up in Portsmouth, Virginia watching her civil engineer father design bridges, studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and absorbed the Bauhaus on a scholarship in Europe. When the war came, she heard that General William "Wild Bill" Donovan was looking for "creative types," and she joined the OSS.

She worked in a large windowless auditorium that looked more like a New York art studio than a government office, alongside an eclectic crew of artists and designers — led by the architect Eero Saarinen and including Donal McLaughlin, who helped design the United Nations emblem. Together they produced propaganda posters, orientation films, training manuals, maps, and three-dimensional models for the War Department. Her bold, geometric OSS work was the seed of everything that followed.

After the war Edna taught at the Philadelphia College of Art, and in the 1960s she found her voice: precise, geometrically intricate patterns in bold contrasting colors that seemed to move. Critics called it Optical Art — Op Art. For forty years she was one of its leading figures, filling canvases and murals with shapes that play tricks on the eye. She died in 2008 at 91, recognized as a major driver of the movement.

The artwork is a stylised tribute — a hypnotic Op Art geometric pattern, and a quiet nod to the decorative camouflage dazzle-patterns of her era. It is not a reproduction of any specific painting.

This shirt is offered in both dark and light garment colours — the pattern in vivid orange on Black, Graphite and Navy, and in a matching dark-ink print on Mustard, Flo Blue and White.

The QR code on the front opens the CIA's article on Edna Andrade, the source for everything above: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/edna-andrade-from-the-oss-to-op-art/

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

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