Shepard Fairey

Frank Shepard Fairey (born February 15, 1970) is an American contemporary artist, activist and founder of OBEY Clothing who emerged from the skateboarding scene.

Fairey became involved with art in 1984, when he started to place his drawings on skateboards and T-shirts.

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.

He moved to Rhode Island in 1988 to attend the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

In 1989 he designed the "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" (...OBEY...) sticker campaign while attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Fairey created the "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" sticker campaign in 1989, while attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

This later evolved into the "Obey Giant" campaign, which has grown via an international network of collaborators replicating Fairey's original designs.

Fairey intended the Obey Giant to inspire curiosity and cause people to question their relationship with their surroundings.

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 in 1990–1991, 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.

In 1992, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Illustration from RISD.

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.

Fairey was a founding partner, along with Dave Kinsey and Phillip DeWolff, of the design studio BLK/MRKT Inc. from 1997 to 2003, which specialized in guerrilla marketing, and "the development of high-impact marketing campaigns".

Clients included Pepsi, Hasbro and Netscape (for whom Fairey designed the red dinosaur version of mozilla.org's logo and mascot).

"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.'"

In 2003, he founded the Studio Number One design agency with his wife, Amanda Fairey.

The agency produced the cover work for The Black Eyed Peas' album Monkey Business and the poster for the film Walk the Line.

Fairey has also designed the covers for The Smashing Pumpkins' album Zeitgeist, Flogging Molly's CD/DVD Whiskey on a Sunday, Led Zeppelin's compilation Mothership and movie Celebration Day, and Anthrax's The Greater Of Two Evils.

Along with Banksy, Dmote, and others, Fairey created work at a warehouse exhibition in Alexandria, Sydney, for Semi-Permanent in 2003.

Approximately 1,500 people attended.

In 2004, Fairey joined artists Robbie Conal and Mear One to create a series of "anti-war, anti-Bush" posters for a street art campaign called "Be the Revolution" for the art collective "Post Gen".

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.

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."

Shepard Fairey was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina.

His father, Strait Fairey, is a doctor, and his mother, Charlotte, a realtor.