The Art Evolution of Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey is not only a force in street art, he’s ubiquitous in our culture, and as the artist behind the Barack Obama Hope poster, how could he not be? His signature designs appear on clothing and collectables, in galleries and on the streets. He even sent a graphic up in space. And long before she was battling with the Associated Press, Shepard Fairey's OBEY imagery was appearing on walls and buildings all over the world. Familiarize yourself with great Los Angeles artist's career with The Art Evolution of Shepard Fairey.

RELATED: Art Evolution of Todd James
RELATED: Street Artists Cover Brooklyn with Murals for the "10 Years of Wooster Collective" Show

Years: 1980s
Notable works: Zines, T-shirts, Skateboards

Fairey fell in love with painting and art at a very early age. It was his involvement with the skateboard scene, while growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, that in part drove his interest in graphic design. Later, he attended the Idyllwild Arts Academy in Southern California, where his interest in the counterculture would be nurtured by proximity to more radicals. Some of his first drawings and paintings were on skateboards and T-shirts, taking influence from the strong graphics and bold lines.

Fairey has said that the graffiti in South Carolina was not very "wild style" but that visiting New York in his teens showed him the lengths to which people would go to get their graffiti on the walls, inspiring him to take similar action. But it was the DIY culture of punk rock that really drew him to his practice, as well. "At first I just cut stencils and spray painted shirts," he told Fecal Face in 2007. "Then I realized my art teacher had a real primitive screen print rig in the back room that no one was using. Then I started screen-printing some shirts for myself and couple extra for friends. You could see that in a short time in 1984-1985 my whole career was beginning to form based on that stuff."

image via

Years: 1989 - 1990
Notable works: Buddy Cianci billboard, Sticker campaign

When Fairey was attending the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989, he would embark on the path that would lead him to international art-world stardom. Showing a fellow classmate how to make simple cutout stencils, he saw an image of André the Giant in an issue of the tabloid Weekly World News. It would become the flagship image for his work: the blank stare of André the Giant, next to his height and weight, the phrase "André the Giant has a posse" scrawled next to the portrait. The phrase was a riff on the hip-hop and skateboard subcultures that burgeoned at the time, as crews of kids would call their cliques "posses." This would set a benchmark for Fairey, in terms of toying with ideas from the underground while simultaneously assuming mainstream imagery for his own means.

It was when convicted felon Buddy Cianci was running for reelection in 1990, Fairey's junior year of college, that the image would take on a political weight. Fairey applied a large wheatpaste of André's face over a billboard that supported Cianci's campaign. Fairey would begin superimposing the face into other works he appropriated, including homages to the Misfits skull and earlier skateboard designs from companies like Vision.

image via

Years: 1989 - Present
Notable works: Stickers

In 1989, Fairey began printing André the Giant stickers at the Kinkos in Providence. He a crew of cohorts—namely Ryan Lesser, Michael Meinhart, Blaize Blouin, Alfred Hawkins, and Mike Mongo—began printing and distributing the stickers. They were Xeroxed, hand-silkscreened pieces that began appearing all over the East Coast, gaining widespread attention. Fairey told to multiple media outlets that the success of the image was a happy accident. But it would lead Fairey on his path to using repeating imagery and familiar motifs in all his work, calling it an exercise in phenomenology.

"The reason Andre works," Fairey told the Boston Phoenix in 1995, "is that it has no agenda. And who decided that public spaces were more attractive without any visual noise? All I've tried to do —like Warhol—make the run of the mill into an icon." That same Phoenix article estimated that, by 1996, more than 600,000 of the stickers had placed on surfaces throughout the nation and the world, included one on Jim Morrison's grave in France.

image via

Years: 1990
Notable works: Formation of artistic philosophy

In 1990, Fairey would partake in a practice common to many artists throughout history: he wrote a manifesto on the topic of his art practice. This gives not only an implied weight to what he was doing, but also a sense of self-seriousness. As much as Fairey ascribed a happy accident to his early ubiquity with André, the consciousness behind the act was much stronger than that phrase would imply.

"Because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the product or motive is not obvious," he wrote in the short manifesto, which is viewable online, "frequent and novel encounters with the sticker provoke thought and possible frustration, nevertheless revitalizing the viewer's perception and attention to detail. The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker. Because OBEY has no actual meaning, the various reactions and interpretations of those who view it reflect their personality and the nature of their sensibilities."

image via

Years: 1992 - 1996
Notable works: Early apparel company

It was after graduating from RISD in 1992 that Fairey began toeing the line between his art practice and entrepreneurship. He began a screenprinting business in Rhode Island called Alternate Graphics. He made T-shirts, skateboards, stickers, and posters that he sold through black and white catalogs that he hand-distributed. Not only would this help fund his street-art provocations, but it would lead him to begin screen-printing his designs onto shirts on a much larger scale, and develop a business acumen that would pay off as his work grew in notoriety and demand. The company lasted until Fairey moved to San Diego to pursue other business ventures.

image via

Years: 1992 - Present
Notable works: OBEY Giant, Icon face

A lawsuit in 1994, brought by Titan Sports, Inc. (now known as World Wrestling Entertainment) brought Fairey to stop using the André the Giant Has a Posse slogan, despite the spread of wrestling's popularity and the positive benefits of the image for the massive company. Fairey then began posting his work with a much more streamlined slogan, inspired by the John Carpenter movie They Live: OBEY. Without predicate, the word itself carries a lack of meaning, though it does carry some kind of sinister connotation. This would become not only the title of Fairey's soon-to-be massive apparel company but also the manifestation of a kind of push-pull with ideas of propaganda while inching into-and being a part of-the mainstream. The André the Giant face was streamlined, flattened, made more ominous, into what Fairey calls "the Icon Face" and the stickers continued to be distributed worldwide. By 1996, he began his entrepreneurial career. "I'm in an awkward position: I'm big enough to compete, but not big enough to get major distribution," he told Wired Magazine in 1996. "And I'm too big to be supported by the underground."

image via

Years: Late '80s - Present
Notable works: Toxicity Inspector

Working on a two-inch scale, and having found success with his work on the Cianci billboard, Fairey started pasting his OBEY Giant poster (and versions of it) in larger and larger relief, on more and more billboards, and in more conspicuous locations. This would set the precedent for his later, large-scale works that would become rich with filigree, design elements, and motif. His pieces became layered, complex, multi-dimensional compositions. He shows us how in this late video clip below.

image via

Years: Late '90s - Present
Notable works: Universal Personhood, Love Unites, Che

As he gained notoriety in the press, Fairey began expanding his palette. In the mid-late '90s, Fairey began appropriating images more synonymous with political agendas. As his business grew, this was seen as not only risqué but also somewhat reprehensible. Perhaps most notable of these was his use of the image of Che Guevara, which was derided as not in the spirit of Guevara's politics. Fairey maintained that the use of the image was a commentary of the already over-saturated nature of Guevara, having appeared on T-shirts for years and years already. This would set in motion a backlash to Fairey's work and activism, as he began having feet in both the worlds of commerce and the anti-establishment, a precarious balance that would continue to be represented in his work as he grew more political and commercial. It seems, when taking an anti-capitalist agenda in his work, self-hatred was a healthy motivator.

image via

Years: 1997 - 2003
Notable works: Guerilla marketing, Mozilla logo

If Fairey could make any statement about what he wanted his art to do—namely to reach as broad an audience as possible, as effectively as possible—there was no reason for him not to delve deeper into advertising. In 1997, after a short venture under the name First Bureau of Imagery, he co-founded the design studio BLK/MRKT with Dave Kinsey and Philip DeWolff. This venture included a small art gallery. For someone who calls himself a "visual communicator" rather than an artist, Fairey's foray into marketing should have been no surprise. And yet many still take issue with the fact that, during the six-year period Fairey was involved with BLK/MRKT, he worked with everyone from Pepsi to Netscape. The firm utilized Fairey's street-art experience, specializing in guerilla marketing, a term that was burgeoning at the time. Fairey's subversive practices were reaching a consumer level.

image via

Years: 1999 - Present
Notable works: "Sticker Shock," "E Pluribus Venom"

By the late '90s, Fairey's work was so well known that galleries began clamoring for him to show work legally, inside the confines of the fine-art system. This often coincided with legal outdoor murals on the walls of the galleries, giving Fairey the time needed to complete much more complicated pieces. He began showing posters and stickers in group and solo exhibitions all over the country. "I never set out to be a groundbreaking artist, in the sense of doing something that's never been done before," he told Mother Jones in 2008. "I set out to make stuff that communicated quickly and effectively, playing off of advertising, pop art, and pop culture."

image via

Years: 2000s - Present
Notable works: Big Brother Is Watching You, Guns and Roses, Nouveau Black, Wage Peace Obey

Fairey continued to hone his aesthetic while unapologetically using symbols and images of pop-culture and politics. Fellow street-artist and culture-jammer Ron English called him "our generation's answer to Andy Warhol." Fairey's work was largely well received for its ease of digestion, but others had problems with the way it seamlessly blended with commerce. The main concern with Fairey's work during this era, as many critics have intoned, is that it did not raise a level of consciousness necessary for it to be called art. Many said the fine-art crossover simply served as a marketing arm to Fairey's OBEY business. He was also accused of plagiarism and cultural misappropriation directly. But all this critical derision simply led to a stronger focus from the artist. "I always work harder when I want to prove people wrong," Fairey said in 2010. It also led him to a greater awareness of activism and philanthropy. He began donating time and money to various political, social, and artistic causes. Fairey was no longer simply a street artist, designer, or businessman. He was becoming an institution, for better or for worse.

image via

Years: 2003 - Present
Notable works: Numerous album and book covers, design work

Fairey founded a new graphics design studio with his wife Amanda in 2003, called Studio Number One. Here, he'd work with rock stars and other companies to create album covers, including for the likes of The Black Eyed Peas and The Smashing Pumpkins. He also worked on book covers for Matt Taibbi, a logo for Google, and a cadre of other work. If allowing a more refined aesthetic to define his work, it also allowed him to finance his gallery, his new magazine called Swindle, and his social activism.

image via

Years: 2006 - 2009
Notable works: First monograph and museum show

Fairey's first solo museum exhibition, and also the title of his first monograph, remarked by title alone on the dual nature of his work as commerce. The book was published in 2006, offering a comprehensive look at his work to that point. The museum exhibition opened in 2009, at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art. It would mark an era of preservation of Fairey's work, much of which had been so ephemeral and transient throughout the years.

image via

Years: 2008
Notable works: Hope

This is the moment when Fairey's work really seeped, with or without choice, into the eyes of all Americans, and many global citizens. In 2008, Fairey used an Associated Press image as source material for a promotional poster supporting the campaign of then-Senator Barack Obama. He used a vibrant blue, a color somewhat foreign to the palette of red and orange and black he'd developed by this time. Fairey printed 300,000 stickers and 500,00 posters during the presidential campaign, and, though it was not officially sanctioned by the campaign, it became an international symbol of Obama's election. The original is now in the Smithsonian Museum. "You know, I'm proud of it as a piece of grassroots activism, but I'll just leave it at that," he told Stephen Colbert in 2010.

image via

Years: 2010
Notable works: May Day

By 2010, Fairey's credentials were solidified when he had has way with the infamous Bowery wall in New York City. By this time, the wall at Houston and Bowery, which became known for its murals after Keith Haring painted it, was under the control of Jeffery Deitch, a prominent gallerist and curator that had previously worked with Fairey. If any moment signaled Fairey's crossover from street-artist to fine-artist, it may have been this one. The mural was vandalized and bombed by "real" graffiti artists over and over. Residents of the neighborhood even took to posting a petition to the wall to "bring back Keith Haring." This level of backlash had never before seen on this wall, considering the number of artists who had shown work there.

image via

Years: 2009 - 2012
Notable works: Legal proceeding that saw the artist settle out of court

Fairey fell under legal scrutiny not related to street art for once in 2009. It was discovered by a blogger that Fairey's use of an image owned by the Associated Press, taken by Mannie Garcia, may have not fallen under fair use statutes. What followed was a strange and tenuous legal battle led Fairey to perjure himself, and discuss publicly issues of copyright control, leading Fairey to be a self-styled free-speech activist.

"I entered into litigation with the AP because I believe in Fair Use, and I wanted to protect the rights of all artists," Fairey said. "The Obama HOPE poster was created and distributed by a belief in what Obama could do for this country and my hope that I could inspire others to thought and action. Making money was never a part of the equation. As funds came in, I used them to create more posters and stickers and make donations to the Obama campaign. Most of the remaining proceeds were given to causes I support and believe in from the ACLU to Feeding America."

image via