Shepard Fairey: The Complete Story
Shepard Fairey (born 1970) is the American street artist behind two of the most reproduced images of our time: the OBEY Giant sticker, born as a 1989 art-school joke, and the Obama HOPE poster of 2008, which changed his life and then took him to court.
His whole career runs on one question: what happens when an image escapes its maker.
Shepard Fairey at a glance
1970. Born in Charleston, South Carolina.
1989. Made the Andre the Giant sticker as an art school joke in Providence. It escaped onto lampposts worldwide.
2001. Founded the Obey clothing line to bankroll the street work.
2008. The HOPE poster spread through the Obama campaign by the hundreds of thousands.
2015. Painted an eighteen story mural in Detroit, his tallest wall to date.
A sticker escapes
At the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989, Fairey cut a sticker of the wrestler Andre the Giant as a lesson for a friend, and pasted it around Providence. The joke replicated: Andre the Giant Has a Posse spread city to city, mutated into the stern OBEY Giant face, and became a decades-long experiment in how an image with no meaning accumulates one through repetition.
HOPE
In 2008 he made a poster of Barack Obama in red, beige and blue, stencilled over the word HOPE, first printed on his own dime and handed out at rallies.
It became the unofficial image of the campaign, and the mixed-media original entered the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in 2009.
Then came the reckoning: the poster was based on an Associated Press photograph by Mannie Garcia.
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The lawsuit he made worse
Fairey sued for a fair-use ruling, then admitted he had destroyed evidence and faked documents about which photo he used.
The civil case settled in 2011, and in 2012 a federal judge sentenced him to probation and a fine for contempt. It remains the cautionary tale of appropriation in the digital age, told with unusual honesty by Fairey himself since.
Eighteen stories in Detroit
In 2015 Fairey painted the side of One Campus Martius in Detroit, roughly 184 feet of wall.
The same visit produced vandalism charges over stickers and posters pasted elsewhere in the city.
The tallest legal wall of his career and a warrant arrived in the same month, which is the Fairey story in miniature.
The clothing line that pays for the walls
Obey Clothing launched in 2001, putting the propaganda star on t-shirts and jackets.
Purists called it selling out. Fairey called it funding: the shirts pay for the murals, the lawyers, and the free posters.
He has kept both machines running for a quarter century.
Marianne at the Élysée
After the 2015 Paris attacks Fairey drew a Marianne, the French republic as a face in his three color style.
President Macron hung a version in his office at the Élysée, and Fairey later repainted it as a mural in the 13th arrondissement.
A street artist wanted by police in one country, framed behind a president in another.
The myth to retire
Sellout is the word his critics reach for: the street artist with a clothing line.
But the commerce was there from the first sticker, and so was the activism; his studio has produced campaign art for voting rights, climate and press freedom for decades. Fairey never claimed purity.
He claimed distribution, and he is arguably the most distributed artist alive.
Where to see Fairey
The HOPE portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. His murals cover walls from Los Angeles to Paris, and the ICA Boston, which gave him his first museum survey in 2009, keeps works in its collection.
The Shepard Fairey questions that keep coming up
What is Shepard Fairey famous for? The OBEY Giant campaign and the 2008 Obama HOPE poster.
What happened with the HOPE poster lawsuit? He settled with AP in 2011 and received probation in 2012 after admitting he destroyed evidence.
What does OBEY mean? Deliberately nothing at first: an experiment in how repetition gives an image power.
Where can I see his work? The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, the ICA Boston, and murals worldwide.
How many Andre the Giant stickers exist? Fairey has estimated more than a million printed and passed along since 1989, most of them by strangers.
Does Shepard Fairey still get arrested? He has been arrested more than a dozen times over the years for postering and graffiti, including charges in Detroit in 2015, the same year he painted the city’s tallest mural.
More secrets to unlock
Celebrated upstairs, prosecuted downstairs
On the opening night of that first ICA Boston survey in February 2009, Fairey was arrested on the way in, on outstanding graffiti warrants. The museum was celebrating work the city was still prosecuting.