Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey Barb Wire Dove Collage Screen Print Contemporary Street Art

2023

In the early ’90s, I fell in love with ’60s psychedelic posters from artists like San Francisco’s Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, and Rick Griffin...

Frank Shepard Fairey was born February 15, 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. Fairey's adolescence was shaped by the influences of punk-rock and skateboarding. In his teens, he began creating his own bootlegged clothing and skateboard decals featuring bands and brands he liked. Fairey’s early bootlegs were created because his generally conservative parents would not purchase the clothing he wanted. In 1986, he stumbled upon the Andre the Giant image for which he has become famous for, in a local newspaper. The image was selected when Fairey demonstrated to a friend how to make a stencil; it was modified slightly to include the meaningless caption “Andre the Giant has a Posse” and made into a sticker. The sticker was reproduced en masse and began to appear around Charleston as it spread through the skateboarding community. While the sticker had no inherent meaning, the public response varied from disregard to curiosity to out-right fear. Civic groups editorialized and theorized that the Andre image was affiliated with everything from a band to a hate group. Nevertheless, the stickers were considered vandalism and in time, Fairey would face numerous charges for defacing public property. Fairey's record includes 15 arrests as of March 2009, for defacing property as a result of his so called bombing campaigns. Fairey affixed the stickers on municipal properties nearly everywhere he went, and the Andre sticker was being seen in Boston and New York City, soon others procured the image and were encouraged to spread the campaign worldwide in the form of stickers, stencils and wheat-paste posters. Following high school, Fairey was accepted to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where, with an interest in screen printing, he majored in illustration. In 1992, while still attending RISD, Fairey started Alternate Graphics, a mail order catalog business through which he could merchandise his own t-shirts, skateboards, posters and stickers. He also took small commercial illustration jobs to help supplement his income. Shortly thereafter, the Andre the Giant Has a Posse logo was shortened simply to Obey Giant. The Obey, for which Fairey has also become synonymous, is derived from the 1988 John Carpenter film They Live. In the film, aliens who appear as human, rule the governments and economies of the world while the humans are reduced to an unwitting, hypnotized slave-class. Themes from the film continue to appear in Fairey’s work. Over time, the Andre the Giant face was modified into a more simplified and streamlined appearance, reminiscent of Russian Constructivist/Rodchenko style Soviet propaganda posters of the 20th Century. In 1994, filmmaker Helen Stickler featured Fairey and his sticker phenomenon in her documentary: Andre the Giant has a Posse. The following year, Fairey started Subliminal Projects with the late Blaize Blouin, his friend and pro-skateboarder. Subliminal Projects created and released several Obey-Giant themed posters and skateboard decks. Fairey directed a short skateboarding film featuring some of his friends through Subliminal Projects and Alternate Graphics titled A.D.D.(Attention Deficit Disorder). In 1996, Fairey moved to San Diego, California to create Giant Distribution with partner Andy Howell. Later, with Howell, Phillip De Wolff, Dave Kinsey, he formed First Bureau of Imagery (FBI), a branding, marketing and design firm established to focus on the increasingly lucrative sports market. FBI was closed in 1999 and Fairey, along with De Wolff and Kinsey created BLK/MRKT, similar to FBI. At this time, Fairey met and began working with Amanda Alaya, whom he would later marry. BLK/MRKT moved to Los Angeles in 2001. Here, they could expand and were able to incorporate a small gallery. Fairey and Kinsey eventually bought out De Wolff’s share of the partnership and by then had set up offices in the Pellissier Building (home of the historic Wiltern Theater), in the Koreatown section of Downtown Los Angeles. In December 2001, Fairey and Alaya were married in Charleston, South Carolina, Amanda has occasionally been the model for Fairey's prints (see: Commanda, 2007). Additionally, Amanda Fairey works in the capacity as publicist, agent and representative of her husband. In 2003, Kinsey and Fairey split. Kinsey retained the BLK/MRKT name and gallery, which he relocated to Culver City, California. Fairey retained the offices and most of the employees to create Studio Number One and the gallery was renamed Subliminal Projects. Studio No. 1 has since gone on to produce numerous memorable album covers, concert and film posters. In 2004, Fairey created the magazine Swindle with his old friend Roger Gastman. Swindle is a quarterly publication that features fashion, art, music and other pop-culture elements. During the 2004 presidential election, Fairey teamed up with artists Mear One and Robbie Conal to create a series of anti-Bush/anti-war posters for the street-art campaign: Be The Revolution. In 2005, Fairey accepted a residency at the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he created murals and prints that reveal a dramatic combination of constructivist style with distinctly traditional Hawaiian themes and influences. Amanda Fairey gave birth to the couple’s first child, Vivienne in June 2005, she is the namesake of punk fashion legend Vivienne Westwood. Vivienne would be the model for Fairey’s “Vivi La Revolucion” print of 2008. Fairey's street-art, was featured with that of Dan Witz...

In the early ’90s, I fell in love with ’60s psychedelic posters from artists like San Francisco’s Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, and Rick Griffin...

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