Shepard Fairey
Frank Shepard Fairey is an American contemporary artist, activist and founder of OBEY Clothing who emerged from the skateboarding scene. In 1989, he designed the "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" sticker campaign while attending the Rhode Island School of Design.
Fairey designed the Barack Obama "Hope" poster for the 2008 U.S. presidential election. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, has described him as one of the best known and most influential street artists. His work is included in the collections at The Smithsonian; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
His style has been described as a "bold iconic style that is based on styling and idealizing images."
Early life
Shepard Fairey was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. His father, Strait Fairey, is a doctor, and his mother, Charlotte, a realtor. He attended Porter-Gaud School in Charleston and transferred to high school at Idyllwild Arts Academy in Idyllwild, California, from which he graduated in 1988.Fairey became involved with art in 1984, when he started to place his drawings on skateboards and T-shirts. He moved to Rhode Island in 1988 to attend the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1992, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Illustration from RISD.
Career
Obey Giant sticker
Fairey first created the "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" image in 1989, while attending the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2008 Fairey commented that: "The Andre the Giant sticker was just a spontaneous, happy accident. I was teaching a friend how to make stencils in the summer of 1989, and I looked for a picture to use in the newspaper, and there just happened to be an ad for wrestling with André the Giant and I told him that he should make a stencil of it. He said 'Nah, I’m not making a stencil of that, that’s stupid!' but I thought it was funny so I made the stencil and I made a few stickers and the group of guys I was hanging out with always called each other The Posse, so it said Andre the Giant Has a Posse, and it was sort of appropriated from hip-hop slang – Public Enemy, N.W.A and Ice-T were all using the word."In 1996 Fairey altered the image of André the Giant and changed the text to read OBEY, which Fairey has described as being a "transition...into something that had more of an Orwellian connotation". It is this new image with the text "OBEY" which has become a worldwide phenomenon.
The "Obey Giant" image then grew in popularity via a campaign from an international network of collaborators replicating Fairey's original designs. The Obey Giant image was for Fairey something that would inspire curiosity and cause people to question their relationship with their surroundings and according to the Obey Giant website, "The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker". The website also says, by contrast, that those who are familiar with the sticker find humor and enjoyment from it and that those who try to analyze its meaning only burden themselves and may condemn the art as an act of vandalism from an evil, underground cult.
Originally intending the sticker campaign to gain fame among his classmates and college peers, Fairey says:
At first I was only thinking about the response from my clique of art school and skateboard friends. The fact that a larger segment of the public would not only notice, but investigate, the unexplained appearance of the stickers was something I had not contemplated. When I started to see reactions and consider the sociological forces at work surrounding the use of public space and the insertion of a very eye-catching but ambiguous image, I began to think there was the potential to create a phenomenon.
In a manifesto he wrote between 1990 and 1991, and since posted on his website, he links his work with Heidegger's concept of phenomenology. His "Obey" Campaign is from the John Carpenter movie They Live which starred pro wrestler Roddy Piper, taking a number of its slogans, including the "Obey" slogan, as well as the "This is Your God" slogan. Fairey has spun off the OBEY clothing line from the original sticker campaign. He also uses the slogan "The Medium is the Message" borrowed from Marshall McLuhan. Shepard Fairey has stated in an interview that part of his work is inspired by other street artists.
Post-graduation
After graduation, he founded a small printing business in Providence, Rhode Island, called Alternate Graphics, specializing in T-shirt and sticker silkscreens, which afforded Fairey the ability to continue pursuing his own artwork. While residing in Providence in 1994, Fairey met American filmmaker Helen Stickler, who had also attended RISD and graduated with a film degree. The following spring, Stickler completed a short documentary film about Shepard and his work, titled "Andre the Giant Has a Posse". The film premiered in the 1995 New York Underground Film Festival and went on to play at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival. It has been seen in more than 70 festivals and museums internationally."From the late ’90s until about 2001," writes Ken Leighton in The San Diego Reader, Fairey lived in East Village, San Diego, where, according to a friend quoted in the article, he co-founded a "guerrilla marketing company called Black Market Design." According to John Goff, a former member of the San Diego–based "tribal post-punk" industrial-noise performance art band Crash Worship, Fairey began appropriating the Russian Constructivist style utilized in Soviet-era propaganda during his time in San Diego. "'I think he became an art icon when he started focusing on Communist imagery,' Goff says. 'He was still in San Diego then. I first met him when he was working above Hooter’s in the Gaslamp.'"
Fairey was a founding partner, along with Dave Kinsey and Phillip DeWolff, of the design studio BLK/MRKT Inc. from 1997 to 2003, which specialized in guerrilla marketing, and "the development of high-impact marketing campaigns". Clients included Pepsi, Hasbro and Netscape.
In 2003, he founded the Studio Number One design agency with his wife, Amanda Fairey. The agency produced the cover work for The Black Eyed Peas' album Monkey Business and the poster for the film Walk the Line. Fairey has also designed the covers for The Smashing Pumpkins' album Zeitgeist, Flogging Molly's CD/DVD Whiskey on a Sunday, Led Zeppelin's compilation Mothership and movie Celebration Day, and Anthrax's The Greater Of Two Evils. Along with Banksy, Dmote, and others, Fairey created work at a warehouse exhibition in Alexandria, Sydney, for Semi-Permanent in 2003. Approximately 1,500 people attended.
In 2004, Fairey joined artists Robbie Conal and Mear One to create a series of "anti-war, anti-Bush" posters for a street art campaign called "Be the Revolution" for the art collective "Post Gen". "Be the Revolution" kicked off with a night of performances featuring Z-Trip, Ozomatli and David J at the Avalon in Hollywood. Fairey also co-founded Swindle Magazine along with Roger Gastman.
In 2005, he collaborated for a second time with Z-Trip on a limited edition 12-inch featuring Chuck D entitled "Shock and Awe". In 2005 Fairey also collaborated with DJ Shadow on a box set, with T-shirts, stickers, prints, and a mix CD by Shadow. In 2005 he showed abroad, for instance in Paris at the Magda Danysz Gallery, and was a resident artist at the Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House. Also in 2005, Fairey contributed the artwork for the posters, cover art, and graphics for Walk The Line the Johnny Cash biopic. In 2006, Fairey contributed eight vinyl etchings to a limited-edition series of 12" singles by post-punk band Mission of Burma and has also done work for the musical group Interpol.
In 2006, Fairey joined NYC based Ad agency Project 2050 as founding Creative Director and was featured on the cover of Advertising Age magazine. While at Project 2050, Shepard developed creative work for Virgin Mega Store and Boost Mobile. The book Supply and Demand: The Art of Shepard Fairey was released in 2006. In 2008, Philosophy of Obey : The Formative Years , edited by Sarah Jaye Williams, was published by Nerve Books UK, and praised by Fairey.
In June 2007, Fairey opened his one-man show entitled "E Pluribus Venom", at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery. The show made the arts section front page in the New York Times.
Fairey donated original cover art to the 2008 album Body of War: Songs That Inspired an Iraq War Veteran, produced for Iraq War documentary Body of War. Proceeds from the album benefit non-profit organization Iraq Veterans Against the War.
In 2008, Fairey teamed up again with Z-Trip to do a series of shows in support of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama entitled Party For Change. Fairey also designed posters for the British goth band Bauhaus.
In September 2008, Shepard opened his solo show titled "Duality of Humanity" at White Walls & Shooting Gallery in San Francisco. His third solo show with the gallery featured one hundred and fifty works, including the largest collection of canvases pieces in one show that he's done.
Fairey was arrested on February 7, 2009, on his way to the premiere of his show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts, on two outstanding warrants related to graffiti. He was charged with damage to property for having postered two Boston area locations with graffiti, a Boston Police Department spokesman said. His arrest was announced to party goers by longtime friend Z-Trip who had been performing at the ICA premiere at Shepard Fairey's request.
On April 27, 2009, Fairey put three signed copies of his Obama inauguration posters up on eBay, with the proceeds of the auction going to the One Love For Chi foundation, founded by the family of Deftones bassist Chi Cheng following a car accident in November 2008 that nearly claimed Cheng's life.
Fairey's first art museum exhibition, titled Supply & Demand, was held in Boston at the Institute of Contemporary Art during the summer of 2009. The exhibition featured more than 250 works in a wide variety of media: screen prints, stencils, stickers, rubylith illustrations, collages, and works on wood, metal and canvas. As a complement to the ICA exhibition, Fairey created public art works around Boston. The artist explains his driving motivation: "The real message behind most of my work is 'question everything'."
In 2011, Time Magazine commissioned Fairey to design its cover to honor "The Protester" as Person of the Year in the wake of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and other social movements around the world. This was Fairey's second Person of the Year cover for Time, his first being of Barack Obama in 2008.
In January 2015, Shepard Fairey made a cameo appearance on Portlandia. In July 2015, Fairey was arrested and detained at Los Angeles International Airport, after passing through customs, on a warrant for allegedly vandalizing 14 buildings in Detroit. He subsequently turned himself in to Detroit Police.
On September 17, 2015, the Jacob Lewis Gallery presented Shepard Fairey's exhibition "On Our Hands", his first solo opening in New York City in five years. The paintings reflect on contemporary issues facing our global community: political corruption, environmental apathy and abuse of power. The exhibition coincides with Fairey's new monograph Covert to Overt, published by Rizzoli.
Life Is Beautiful Fremont East District, Las Vegas Mural Project 2016.