Shepard Fairey

• Born: February 15, 1970
• Place of Birth: Charleston, South Carolina

Shepard Fairey gained international recognition for his design of a poster of Barack Obama seen frequently during the 2008 US presidential campaign. Known to some as a street artist and to others as a commercial graphic designer, his work sparked a national debate on the use of others’ work in both commercial and artistic efforts.

Frank Shepard Fairey was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1970. As a teenager he got into punk rock and skateboarding, and began designing t-shirts and art for skateboards. He graduated from Idyllwild Arts Academy in California in 1988 and then earned a BFA in illustration from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1992. While at RISD he had his first experience with street art as a viral cultural phenomenon, creating a sticker campaign called "Andre the Giant Has a Posse." Millions of small stickers with the meaningless slogan, paired with an image of professional wrestler Andre the Giant, were eventually posted in public places by young people across the United States and around the world. Later Fairey evolved the image into just a stylized face with the word "Obey" under it, and it has become a clothing brand.

At the start of the 2000s, Fairey was working at BLK/MRKT, a design firm that he had cofounded in San Diego in the late 1990s. While at the firm, Fairey participated in guerilla marketing for companies such as Pepsi and Netscape. Fairey left BLK/MRKT to move to Los Angeles, where he and his wife Amanda started their own design firm, Studio Number One, in 2003.

During the mid-2000s, Fairey’s work appeared in one-man shows and other exhibits in the United States and Europe. His work is part of the permanent collections of museums including the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.

In early 2008, when California was anticipating the 2008 Super Tuesday presidential primary, Fairey and Yosi Sergant, a publicist, decided to create a poster to get out the vote for Democratic candidate Barack Obama in California. Fairey and Sergant had spoken of the possibility of the campaign in 2007, but Fairey was reluctant to divert attention from Obama, or to jeopardize Obama’s credibility because of his own past. He knew that his past arrests for street art—for posting his art in public places without authorization, akin to grafitti—might have been a problem for the campaign. After consulting with campaign organizers, the two went ahead and created a poster—it took Fairey about a day to create the poster and another to print out 700 copies. He sold 350 and gave away the remaining 350. The sale of the poster paid for a second printing of 4,000 which were handed out at rallies and events. The initial run of 700 posters read “Progress,” but feedback from the campaign prompted Fairey to change the text to “Hope.”

Fairey’s portrait of Obama became part of the collection at the National Portrait Gallery shortly before Obama’s inauguration. The image was chosen as the cover for national publications, including Time magazine’s 2008 Person of the Year issue and Esquire (Feb. 2009). Rolling Stone commissioned a different portrait of Obama from Fairey for its August 2009 issue.

In February 2009, Fairey was on his way to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, for the opening of his solo exhibition, Supply and Demand, when he was arrested on outstanding warrants for illegally tagging property with his “Obey” logo. As part of his July 2009 plea bargain, Fairey pleaded guilty to three counts of vandalism and paid a two thousand dollar fine, banned himself from Suffolk County, Massachusetts, for two years, and issued an apology for posting his art without property owners’ permission.

The Obama "Hope" poster established Fairey as a sought-after public artist whose work has continued to make headlines. In 2014 he created a nearly one-hundred-foot-tall mural of South African statesman Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg, and the year after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France, he created a poster with the French national slogan, "Liberté, égalité, fraternité," a copy of which French president Emmanuel Macron hung in his office after taking office in 2017. A documentary about Fairey, Obey Giant, was also released in 2017.

Fairey’s move into the mainstream as a celebrity artist has prompted some to question whether he has lost his credibility as a street artist, while others point to incidents like his 2009 arrest as evidence that he has kept his edge. Still others have questioned the artistic value of work that is borrowed and adapted, as much of Fairey’s work is. The Obama poster itself is an artistic adaption of a photo shot by Mannie Garcia while freelancing for the Associated Press (in 2011 Fairey and the AP settled a lawsuit over his use of the photo, which the AP said violated the fair use doctrine). He has admittedly borrowed from Soviet and Chinese propaganda posters, art nouveau works, and the work of others, but claims that the work becomes original when it is recontextualized.

Fairey and his wife live in Los Angeles with their two daughters.

Impact

Fairey’s art has met with a mixed critical response. Fairey openly acknowledges that he adopts images and graphics from other sources, often without giving credit to the original artist or creator. This practice sparked a national debate on fair use and artistic credibility and has opened Fairey up to lawsuits. At the same time, Fairey has consistently been an outspoken activist for liberal and progressive causes and often donates proceeds from his work to organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Feeding America, and other humanitarian and anti-war causes.

Bibliography

Arnon, Ben. “How the Obama 'Hope' Poster Reached a Tipping Point and Became a Cultural Phenomenon: An Interview with the Artist Shepard Fairey.” The Huffington Post, 13 Oct. 2008, www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-arnon/how-the-obama-hope-poster‗b‗133874.html. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Finkel, Jori. "After ‘Hope,’ and Lawsuit, Shepard Fairey Tries Damage Control." The New York Times, 3 Nov. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/arts/design/shepard-fairey-damaged-chinatown.html. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Johnson, Ken. “Can a Rebel Stay a Rebel without the Claws?” The New York Times, 17 Mar. 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/us/18fair.html. Accessed 23 May 2024.

O’Donoghue, Liam. “Interview: Shepard Fairey.” Mother Jones, Mar./Apr. 2008, www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/03/interview-shepard-fairey/. Accessed 22 June 2012.

Sayej, Nadja. "20 Minutes With: Street Artist Shepard Fairey." Penta, 7 Feb. 2022, www.barrons.com/articles/20-minutes-with-street-artist-shepard-fairey-01644265483. Accessed 23 May 2024.

Schwartz, Hunter. "Life after 'Hope': Obama Poster Creator Shepard Fairey Reflects on Art and Politics in the Age of Trump." CNN, 21 Nov. 2017, www.cnn.com/2017/11/20/politics/shepard-fairey-obey-giant/index.html. Accessed 23 May 2024.