From humble beginnings as a defiant, skateboard-obsessed art student pasting homemade stickers, Shepard Fairey has developed into one of the most influential street artists of our time. Despite breaking many of the spoken and unspoken rules of contemporary art and culture, his work is now seen in museums and galleries, as well as the worlds of graphic design and signature apparel. His multi-faceted, open-ended and generous artistic practice actively resists categorization. Building off of precedents set by artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Fairey shifts easily between the realms of fine, commercial, and even political art.
Fairey has become one of the most visible practitioners of a guerrilla-style art that has grown out of the graffiti scene but has expanded beyond paint to include a wide variety of techniques and materials, producing works usually displayed illegally on buildings and signs. A star in the world of street art for nearly two decades (his stickers of the wrestler Andre the Giant earned him an A on an assignment at the Rhode Island School of Design), Mr. Fairey has parlayed his stark imagery into a successful design and marketing company, Obey Giant, with corporate clients like Pepsi.
The Obey sticker campaign, born in 1990 as a street art campaign and an experiment in Phenomenology, attempting to stimulate curiosity and to bring people to question both the sticker and their relationship with their surroundings, has influenced Shepard’s other artistic works often including fine art, screen prints (including Band Prints), skateboards, clothing, and toys. ”Obey” images and slogans appear on T-shirts sold at Urban Outfitters, and he has created logos for Kobe Bryant and other personalities as well as rock-music album covers.
Fairey’s multi-layered renderings of counter-cultural revolutionaries and rap, punk and rock stars, as well as updated and re-imagined propaganda-style posters, carry his signature graphic style, marked by his frequent use of black, white, and red. In 2008, his portrait of Barack Obama, a ubiquitous sight on the campaign trail, drew a new level of attention to the artist’s work and was recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, for its collection.
Through it all Mr. Fairey, born in 1970, has continued scaling fences and clambering atop buildings to put up his purposefully simplistic, propagandistic images with the help of his employees. The street work goes on despite changes in his health (he is diabetic and wears an insulin drip under his shirt), family status — he is married with two young daughters — and the continued arrests for putting up his posters.
