Who is Shepard Fairey?
Shepard Fairey is a Los Angeles-based artist and influential member of the Street Art Movement. He is best known for his work creating the OBEY art series of posters, vinyl stickers, and other commercial work. More recently, Fairey has gotten quite popular for his gallery work, which marries some of his earlier techniques with His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.
How did Shepard Fairey get started?
Shepard Fairey was born in 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina. He rose to fame in the early 1990s with the creation of his Obey series, which he dispersed in public spaces in the form of prints, posters, murals, and stickers. Fairey’s popularity grew further when he transformed his seminal 1989 “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” sticker into a widely recognizable symbol for his clothing company OBEY. Founded in 2001, OBEY became an extension of Fairey’s activism, incorporating political and social propaganda into its designs.
What is Shepard Fairey famous for?
Shepard Fairey is most famous for his OBEY series, which is a postmodern mashup of pop images, iconography, and commercial art. Fairey recontextualizes these images to create something new, which he says is to, “reawaken a sense of wonder about one’s environment. The OBEY campaign attempts to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the campaign and their relationship with their surroundings. Because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the motive is not obvious, frequent and novel encounters with OBEY propaganda provoke thought and possible frustration, nevertheless revitalizing the viewer’s perception and attention to detail. To catalyze a thoughtful dialogue deconstructing the process of image absorption is the ultimate goal.”
What kind of art does Shepard Fairey make?
Fairey’s work disrupts the boundaries between fine and commercial art and combines elements of graffiti, appropriation, portraiture and pop art. He is best known for his iconic portrait of President Barack Obama titled Hope (2008). It portrays the then-presidential candidate in red, white, and blue and the word HOPE in large, bold letters. Hope became a visual emblem associated with a major moment in American history.