Who is Shepard Fairey?

Shepard Fairey is more inspired by the Ramones and the Sex Pistols than Van Gogh and Warhol. His street art may be beautiful and inspiring, but it ain't marble sculptures enshrined in a museum. Instead, it’s risky, raw and installed out in our normal world. How many artists do you know that are regularly arrested for putting up their work? Fairey is.

Andre the Giant ... that's right, the wrestler

Fairey grew up in Charleston, South Carolina in 1970 and was a skateboarding punk rock kid with no real interest in art. When he was 14, he and his buddies started decorating their boards with stickers. He began to make his own and was soon hooked. He says that this was key to him becoming an artist:

what really got me making art the way I make it now was that there wasn't any punk record stores [to buy stickers and t-shirts in] . . . so I started making my own.

While in college, one of his friends asked him to teach him how to make stickers. Fairey found a funny image of professional wrestler Andre the Giant and used it to teach his friend. As a joke, he started putting the sticker up in public spaces. While it started as an inside joke with his buddy, it quickly became an obsession, and Providence was soon plastered with the Andre the Giant has a Posse stickers.

The sticker campaign eventually extended all along the east coast. Fairey began sending his stickers to friends who the put them up in their hometowns. He even ran classified ads in skateboarding magazines asking others to help plaster their towns with the Andre stickers. The entire time, he kept an extremely low profile, intentionally only telling a small handful of friends that he was behind the stickers. He would soon realize how he could use his empty symbol to engage and challenge everyday people.

The Power of Propaganda

Buddy Cianci was running for mayor of Providence and had a billboard promoting his campaign installed near a busy intersection. Under the cover of night, Fairey covered the candidates name with “Andre”, changing the billboard to “Andre never stopped caring about Providence.” Next he went to the local copy shop and blew up his Andre head to the same size as the candidate’s billboard face and climbed back up onto the billboard a second time, covering Cianci’s face with Andre’s. The next day, he was surprised when the billboard was all over the news. He then found out that years earlier Cianci had been mayor and had was booted from office after beating up his ex-wife’s boyfriend and then having police officers hold him down while he put a lit cigar in the man’s eye.

While he didn’t intend to make a statement about Cianci being a brute, he realized that he could use his art to attack political hypocrisy. In Fairey’s words:

The incident opened my eyes to the power of propaganda.

He realized he had a sleeping giant on his hands. The Cianci incident revealed that he could use graffiti and street art for more than a joke or reclaiming public space.

Now

Now, over twenty years later, Fairey continues to put his art up in public spaces. His work reclaims billboards and other spaces traditionally used for advertising. However, his work intentionally promotes no product, only ideas. So, by using spaces traditionally used for advertising, he challenges mass media, advertising, commercialism and the status quo.

Not only that, but it looks really, really cool.