Artist Blog Post 11.25.10

Shepard Fairey

Born in Charleston, SC in 1970, Shepard Fairey currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Fairey received his B.A. from
Rhode Island School of Design in 1992.
Shepard Fairey has been developing his iconic street art and graphic designs for 15 years, and his collaged and stenciled paintings have been exhibited inmany galleries including New York, Paris, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. 

His first Retrospective exhibition was at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in February, 2009. 


Shepard Fairey is a Los Angeles based graphic designer, who is very much present in today’s art scene. He is most known for his Barrack Obama “Hope” portrait. This poster became the iconic campaign image for the first African American president of the United States. Early in 2008, Fairey produced his first Obama portrait, with a stenciled face, visionary upward glance, and the caption “Progress.” In this second version, Fairey repeated the heroic pose and patriotic color scheme, substituting the slogan “Hope.”

            In fact, this piece came to the museum through the generosity of Washington, D.C., art collectors Heather and Tony Podesta, in honor of Tony Podesta’s mother, the late Mary K. Podesta.  This large-scale mixed-media stenciled collage is on view in the “New Arrivals” exhibition, on the museum’s first floor. The image however went “viral” as Fairey puts it. His intentions for this piece were for it to be widely reproduced and made salient in the general public. The campaign sold 50,000 official posters; a San Francisco street wear company produced T-shirts; grassroots organizations disseminated hundreds of thousands of stickers; and a free downloadable version generated countless repetitions. Although the reproductions rarely convey the elegant surface patterning seen in the original collage, they forged an unprecedented and powerful icon for Obama’s historic campaign.

            Shepard Fairey’s artwork is not contained to paper and posters. He has recently placed his mark on a Miami restraint, the Wynwood Kitchen and Bar, via murals on the internal walls throughout the building. Though the majority of Fairey’s pieces do have political connotations, he revised and redid some of his pieces for the mural, removing the political aspects and leaving strong images that are visually appealing and not political statements as well.

When I stumbled across the article of this restaurant’s murals, I was intrigued because I too have made a mural. Fairey’s ability to revise his pieces for the needs and desires of those who are commissioning him is intriguing.  In the last project we did, which actually resembled Fairey’s work, I too revised my work from what I envisioned my finish piece being to what was actually feasible and more powerful in conveying the point I wanted to get across. Unlike Fairey however, I am not very knowledgeable of the political parties of this country or any other. Because of this, I do feel some people may pay him more attention if he had pieces that were not entirely run by politics. This point can also be a positive though. Fairey’s artwork is known for his visual interpretations of political situations. At least he has made a name for himself, that’s more than I can say for myself.