🇺🇸Shepard
Fairey

In 1989, a nineteen-year-old student at the Rhode Island School of Design was showing a friend how to make a stencil. He took a photograph of the professional wrestler André the Giant, cut out a stencil, and printed it on a sticker with the words "André the Giant Has a Posse." He stuck the sticker on a stop sign. That was it. There was no manifesto, no artistic programme, no gallery backing. There was a sticker, a stop sign, and the vague but insistent feeling that something interesting had happened. The student was Shepard Fairey, and what he had started — without knowing it — was one of the most sustained and pervasive acts of unofficial public art in American history.

Fairey grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of a physician father and a real estate agent mother. By his early teens he was heavily involved in skateboarding and punk music — both cultures with strong traditions of DIY graphic production — and was already making T-shirts, stickers, and hand-lettered posters for local bands. He enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1988 to study illustration, and it was there, in that dense urban environment, that he began to understand how public space could function as a medium. He had absorbed the theory of the Situationist International — Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, the détournement of advertising imagery — and he understood that the street was a contested territory in which every billboard, every advertisement, every piece of official signage was a claim to attention. His stickers were a counterclaim.

The André the Giant sticker spread with astonishing speed. Fairey gave his friends stickers to paste while travelling; he sent them to skateboarders, to punk bands, to anyone who would paste them in a new city. Within a few years the face of André the Giant had appeared in hundreds of American cities without any advertising budget or institutional support. Fairey formalised the campaign as "OBEY Giant" — dropping the André name when WWE threatened legal action — and created the now-iconic graphic: the stylised face rendered in black, red, and cream, beneath a single word. The word "OBEY" was chosen precisely because it had no specific content; it was a command that demanded, when encountered without obvious source, that the viewer question who was commanding and why. It was public art as philosophical interrogation, delivered in the visual language of totalitarian propaganda.

After graduating from RISD in 1992, Fairey moved to San Diego, then Boston, then Los Angeles, building a graphic design career alongside his street art practice. He founded a design company, Studio Number One, which produced commercial work for clients including Led Zeppelin, the Black Eyed Peas, and Hasbro, while he continued to paste unauthorised images on walls across America and internationally. He was arrested for graffiti more than fourteen times. In 2001 he launched OBEY Clothing, a streetwear brand that commercialised the OBEY imagery and became a significant revenue source funding his continuing art practice.

In January 2008, a few days after Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses, Fairey saw a photograph of Obama taken by Associated Press photographer Mannie Garcia and recognised in it exactly the quality he wanted to capture: forward-looking, resolute, transformational. Over the next few days he created the image that would become the most widely distributed political art image in American history. Working in the red, white, and blue of the American flag, he posterised the photograph into a four-colour graphic and placed the word "HOPE" beneath it. He printed an initial run of 700 posters and put them on walls in Los Angeles. Within weeks the image had spread virally across the internet. The Obama campaign adopted it informally. It appeared on merchandise, on murals, on magazine covers. The Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery acquired an original for its permanent collection.

The image was not without legal difficulty. The Associated Press sued over the use of Garcia's photograph; Fairey counter-sued; the case settled in 2011. He pleaded guilty to a federal charge of contempt of court related to the destruction of evidence in the case and received two years of probation and a $25,000 fine. The legal proceedings did nothing to diminish either the image's cultural resonance or his standing as the most influential American street artist of his generation. He has continued to produce large-scale murals on buildings across the world — on the subject of climate change, immigration, corporate power, and democratic values — maintaining the OBEY project as an ongoing inquiry into the mechanics of visual influence and the uses of public space.