Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand
Here's an edited bit of text about and including quotes form Shepard Fairey (Obey) that we found interesting and gives a good background to Shepard and his work if you still haven't heard of him. Original text an be found here (best give them a mention).
Now the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston has organized the first museum exhibit of Fairey’s art. The exhibit of screen prints, stencils, stickers, illustrations and works on wood, metal and canvas showcases Fairey’s favourite subjects: portraits of countercultural revolutionaries, politicians, mainstream heroes and punk, rap and rock musicians.
All of the art appears in Fairey’s signature style of black, red and off-white graphics, which samples and recycles motifs from the Russian Revolution, Mao’s China and W.P.A. propaganda posters. There’s also a nod to Andy Warhol’s portrait art. The work is often multilayered and collaged with wallpaper patterns, stock certificates, stamps and the like. Given Fairey’s primary reputation as a street artist, the big surprise is encountering these labor-intensive pieces in person and discovering how drop-dead beautiful they are.
The night of his ICA opening, Fairey was picked up by the police for his citywide campaign of urban graffiti (condoned by the institute as part of the exhibit). Simultaneously, several prestigious art critics chastised him for losing his “street cred” by agreeing to design Saks Fifth Avenue’s windows and shopping bags in New York City. And he is being sued for abuse of the “fair use” copyright law by Mannie Garcia, the freelance photojournalist who took the original HOPE photograph of Obama in 2006 while the latter was listening to Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas at a conference.
None of this seems to intimidate Fairey. He has been arrested more than a dozen times in his career for invading environments with his posters and street art. From the start, he unabashedly worked as an independent designer for corporate clients. He’s now countersuing Garcia, explaining that he found the unidentified photo on the Web.
Fairey’s work operates at the intersection of beauty, politics and advertising, producing a collision of ideas and imagery. He’s an artist who believes there are issues worth advancing, and he’s not afraid to use visual pleasure for politically seductive purposes. More unforgivable in the art world is the populist appeal of his art, which is something that always makes the intellectual powers-that-be suspicious.
Fairey writes in his museum catalog that early on, he was adamant that “people should not submit to any attempts to herd and manipulate them.” At age 19, while a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, he began making black-and-white stickers of the deceased wrestler Andre the Giant, whom he admired for having overcome adversity. He pasted them around town as a lark.
“I was having such a good time putting up the stickers,” he writes, “and in doing so I observed some interesting sociological phenomena. … The way I interpreted it, people become numb to their environment, and they need certain experiences to snap them out of their trance. … I felt that people didn’t really question things and thus allowed themselves to be manipulated by advertising and other social structures, and the idea of phenomenology, reawakening a sense of wonder about one’s environment, seemed to be the effect that my stickers had been having.”
He concluded that his sticker campaign fostered significant dialogue.
Soon Fairey began adding the word “OBEY” to his posters. Once again, he seemed to question people’s robotic behavior. Since then, by his own count he has made 2.5 million stickers, 45,000 posters and thousands of spray paint stencils of subjects such as terrorism and environmental destruction.
Among Fairey’s most inspired artworks are his album covers and music posters, corporate efforts that help pay for his street art. “No matter how much I love art,” he once wrote, “or try to convince myself of its relevance in society, the fact remains that music is a lot cooler and way more able to reach people’s hearts and minds."
Now the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston has organized the first museum exhibit of Fairey’s art. The exhibit of screen prints, stencils, stickers, illustrations and works on wood, metal and canvas showcases Fairey’s favourite subjects: portraits of countercultural revolutionaries, politicians, mainstream heroes and punk, rap and rock musicians.
All of the art appears in Fairey’s signature style of black, red and off-white graphics, which samples and recycles motifs from the Russian Revolution, Mao’s China and W.P.A. propaganda posters. There’s also a nod to Andy Warhol’s portrait art. The work is often multilayered and collaged with wallpaper patterns, stock certificates, stamps and the like. Given Fairey’s primary reputation as a street artist, the big surprise is encountering these labor-intensive pieces in person and discovering how drop-dead beautiful they are.
The night of his ICA opening, Fairey was picked up by the police for his citywide campaign of urban graffiti (condoned by the institute as part of the exhibit). Simultaneously, several prestigious art critics chastised him for losing his “street cred” by agreeing to design Saks Fifth Avenue’s windows and shopping bags in New York City. And he is being sued for abuse of the “fair use” copyright law by Mannie Garcia, the freelance photojournalist who took the original HOPE photograph of Obama in 2006 while the latter was listening to Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas at a conference.
None of this seems to intimidate Fairey. He has been arrested more than a dozen times in his career for invading environments with his posters and street art. From the start, he unabashedly worked as an independent designer for corporate clients. He’s now countersuing Garcia, explaining that he found the unidentified photo on the Web.
Fairey’s work operates at the intersection of beauty, politics and advertising, producing a collision of ideas and imagery. He’s an artist who believes there are issues worth advancing, and he’s not afraid to use visual pleasure for politically seductive purposes. More unforgivable in the art world is the populist appeal of his art, which is something that always makes the intellectual powers-that-be suspicious.
Fairey writes in his museum catalog that early on, he was adamant that “people should not submit to any attempts to herd and manipulate them.” At age 19, while a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, he began making black-and-white stickers of the deceased wrestler Andre the Giant, whom he admired for having overcome adversity. He pasted them around town as a lark.
“I was having such a good time putting up the stickers,” he writes, “and in doing so I observed some interesting sociological phenomena. … The way I interpreted it, people become numb to their environment, and they need certain experiences to snap them out of their trance. … I felt that people didn’t really question things and thus allowed themselves to be manipulated by advertising and other social structures, and the idea of phenomenology, reawakening a sense of wonder about one’s environment, seemed to be the effect that my stickers had been having.”
He concluded that his sticker campaign fostered significant dialogue.
Soon Fairey began adding the word “OBEY” to his posters. Once again, he seemed to question people’s robotic behavior. Since then, by his own count he has made 2.5 million stickers, 45,000 posters and thousands of spray paint stencils of subjects such as terrorism and environmental destruction.
Among Fairey’s most inspired artworks are his album covers and music posters, corporate efforts that help pay for his street art. “No matter how much I love art,” he once wrote, “or try to convince myself of its relevance in society, the fact remains that music is a lot cooler and way more able to reach people’s hearts and minds."
Labels: Obey, Shepard Fairey
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