Shepard Fairey OBEY GIANT Obama, "Progress".

History:

Frank Shepard Fairey (born February 15, 1970) is an American contemporary artist, activist and founder of OBEY Clothing who emerged from the skateboarding scene. In 1989, he designed the "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" (...OBEY...) sticker campaign while attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Fairey designed the Barack Obama "Hope" poster for the 2008 U.S. presidential election. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, has described him as one of the best known and most influential street artists.[5] His work is included in the collections at The Smithsonian; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

His style has been described as a "bold iconic style that is based on styling and idealizing images."
Early life

Shepard Fairey was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. His father, Strait Fairey, is a doctor, and his mother, Charlotte, a realtor. He attended Porter-Gaud School in Charleston and transferred to high school at Idyllwild Arts Academy in Idyllwild, California, from which he graduated in 1988.

Fairey became involved with art in 1984, when he started to place his drawings on skateboards and T-shirts. He moved to Rhode Island in 1988 to attend the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In 1992, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Illustration from RISD.


Fairey first created the "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" image in 1989, while attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In 2008 Fairey commented that: "The Andre the Giant sticker was just a spontaneous, happy accident. I was teaching a friend how to make stencils in the summer of 1989, and I looked for a picture to use in the newspaper, and there just happened to be an ad for wrestling with André the Giant and I told him that he should make a stencil of it. He said 'Nah, I’m not making a stencil of that, that’s stupid!' but I thought it was funny so I made the stencil and I made a few stickers and the group of guys I was hanging out with always called each other The Posse, so it said Andre the Giant Has a Posse, and it was sort of appropriated from hip-hop slang – Public Enemy, N.W.A and Ice-T were all using the word."

In 1996 Fairey altered the image of André the Giant and changed the text to read OBEY, which Fairey has described as being a "transition ...into something that had more of an Orwellian connotation". It is this new image with the text "OBEY" which has become a worldwide phenomenon.

The "Obey Giant" image was also put up on the streets in posters, stencils and stickers via a campaign from an international network of collaborators as well as by people who had no connection to Fairey but were interested in putting the image on the streets.The Obey Giant image was for Fairey something that would inspire curiosity and cause people to question their relationship with their surroundings and according to the Obey Giant website, "The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker". The website also says, by contrast, that those who are familiar with the sticker find humor and enjoyment from it and that those who try to analyze its meaning only burden themselves and may condemn the art as an act of vandalism from an evil, underground cult.

Originally intending the sticker campaign to gain fame among his classmates and college peers, Fairey says:

At first I was only thinking about the response from my clique of art school and skateboard friends. The fact that a larger segment of the public would not only notice, but investigate, the unexplained appearance of the stickers was something I had not contemplated. When I started to see reactions and consider the sociological forces at work surrounding the use of public space and the insertion of a very eye-catching but ambiguous image, I began to think there was the potential to create a phenomenon.

In a manifesto he wrote between 1990 and 1991, and since posted on his website, he links his work with Heidegger's concept of phenomenology. His "Obey" Campaign is from the John Carpenter movie They Live which starred pro wrestler Roddy Piper, taking a number of its slogans, including the "Obey" slogan, as well as the "This is Your God" slogan. Fairey has spun off the OBEY clothing line from the original sticker campaign. He also uses the slogan "The Medium is the Message" borrowed from Marshall McLuhan. Shepard Fairey has stated in an interview that part of his work is inspired by other street artists.

After graduation, he founded a small printing business in Providence, Rhode Island, called Alternate Graphics, specializing in T-shirt and sticker silkscreens, which afforded Fairey the ability to continue pursuing his own artwork. While residing in Providence in 1994, Fairey met American filmmaker Helen Stickler, who had also attended RISD and graduated with a film degree. The following spring, Stickler completed a short documentary film about Shepard and his work, titled "Andre the Giant Has a Posse". The film premiered in the 1995 New York Underground Film Festival and went on to play at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival. It has been seen in more than 70 festivals and museums internationally.

"From the late ’90s until about 2001," writes Ken Leighton in The San Diego Reader, Fairey lived in East Village, San Diego, where, according to a friend quoted in the article, he co-founded a "guerrilla marketing company called Black Market Design." According to John Goff, a former member of the San Diego–based "tribal post-punk" industrial-noise performance art band Crash Worship, Fairey began appropriating the Russian Constructivist style utilized in Soviet-era propaganda during his time in San Diego. "'I think he became an art icon when he started focusing on Communist imagery,' Goff says. 'He was still in San Diego then. I first met him when he was working above Hooter’s in the Gaslamp.'"
Mozilla's former logo, as designed by Shepard Fairey in 1998