Shepherd Fairey at the ICA
Creator of Barack Obama's Campaign Portrait Icon
By: Mark Favermann - Feb 06, 2009
Shepherd Fairey: Supply and Demand
February 6 to August 18, 2009
Curated by Pedro Alonzo and Emily Moore Bouillet
The Institute of Contemporary Art
Boston, MA
http://www.icaboston.org/
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston is currently showing the work of Los Angeles based artist/designer Shepherd Fairey. It is the artist's first museum exhibition. Fairey's fame has been established by nearly two decades of street art and a year long creation of iconic images of President Barack Obama. Fairey's Obama Hope poster became the dominant image of the presidential campaign.
Where design and visual art converge is a viscerally appealing phenomenon. Fairey's work takes the notion that graphic design and illustration can be expanded to become fine art and public art. He has been a combination of things since he started at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) two decades ago. He is an illustrator with a strong, clear, graphic quality, an artist who created personal statements and a street artist who ambushed the urban environment with public pieces.
Supply and Demand is the first solo museum show for Fairey. Starting as a skateboard-obsessed RISD art student with attitude, who pasted homemade stickers on street furniture and buildings, Fairey has developed into one of the most influential artists of our time. Despite breaking many taboos of contemporary art, his work is now seen in museums and galleries, as well as, in the genres of graphic design and even signature apparel.
Starting as an artistic rebel, he is now embraced by the establishment. He is a multi-faceted and generous artist who is hard to pigeon-hole. He wants his art to be accessible and affordable. He sells prints at reasonable prices in limited editions, even though resale is often set at multiples of the original cost. There are clear precedents for his work in that of Andy Warhol and Keith Haring among others. The Warhol pictorial graphic aesthetic is evident, while Haring's street art, to commercial designer, to museum exhibitor is also a parallel. Stylistically consistent, Fairey is an artistic shape-shifter creating work that moves easily from and between fine, commercial, fashion, and political art.
Many of Fairey's works are focused on multi-layered renderings of counter-cultural rebels, revolutionaries, rappers, and rock stars. His style is influenced by Russian Constructivist posters and graphics. There is a contemporized retro historical aspect to his work. It is a form of reductive realism. Many of the pieces actually look like they have precedents in Chinese or Russian propaganda ephemera. The work is often strategically red, black or blue infused high contrast photo image based. Black line is a structural element in much of the work. This is reflected in a frequent strong use of black as detail emphasis or background.
His ubiquitous image of then presidential candidate, Barack Obama, was recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Remember Richard Nixon was painted by Norman Rockwell. For Obama, Fairey took a photographic portrait transformed it into an image that became a transcendent idea.
The Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand exhibit traces the development of the artist's 20 year career. It begins with the earliest OBEY imagery through the latest pieces. The show includes a variety of media: Screen prints, stencils, stickers, illustrations, collages, and works on wood, metal, and canvas. He is also creating a new mural for the ICA and public art works in and around the City of Boston.
The exhibition includes about 200 works, ranging from Fairey's well-known OBEY GIANT stencil to screen prints, recent mixed-media works and a major new commission for the ICA. Pedro H. Alonzo, a longtime champion of Fairey's work is the ICA's guest curator. The exhibition is accompanied by a special edition of Supply & Demand, a retrospective publication of the artist's work.
Co-curated by Emily Moore Bouillet, a former assistant curator at the ICA, the show examines themes in Fairey's work. "Propaganda," "Portraiture," and "Hierarchies of Power" view how the artist pushes critical thinking about the images that surround us, whether advertising, heroes, or symbols of wealth or power. "War and Peace" reflects recent U.S. military operations and reveals faces of conflict. "Stylized" investigates Fairey's very similar Warhol-like blurring of popular culture and fine art. "Question Everything" presents the various and varied forms and vehicles for the artist's work. This section includes stickers, large-scale murals, or framed work on gallery walls.
Shepherd Fairey was an early viral artist. He took ads out in skateboard magazines calling on people to request and put up his stickers in the urban environment. With the internet, his reach is far and his distribution is massive. Part of the acceptance of the Obama poster as an icon was done through the internet. A sobering pushback on this viral approach is that there is currently a lawsuit in process in regard to the use of the original Barack Obama photo from The Associated Press. Fairey and his lawyers say that it was in the public domain.
There is a cool decorative aspect to Fairey's artwork. It is a Warhol-like cool. It is slick without being glossy, appealing without being corny-- sort of in the way that Warhol's work was. In his work can be found something that strategically connects to our society and culture without being too sweet or too salty.
A case in point is Facebook. It appears that the ubiquitous Faceboook free networking site has many images of its members popping up in the coloration and visual character of the Obama portrait. Folks adept with Adobe Photoshop and/or Illustrator (CS3/4) are creating their own likenesses in this way. Here, the media is more than the message.
An odd personal note: One of Shepherd Fairey's earliest heroic works was a portrait of the professional wrestler, Andre the Giant with the word "OBEY." This connects me strangely to the artist. When I was a freshman in college at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA, I competed in an intermural fraternity wrestling competition. My opponent was a tall, exceedingly strong athlete who rejoiced in the name of F. Strait (no kidding) Fairey. He is now a prominent doctor in Charleston, SC and the father of Shepherd Fairey. I was considered the underdog as Fairey was a year ahead of me in school and was considered to be extremely fit. I was a freshman, remember.
However, what was unknown was I had been a decent high school wrestler, and at 180 pounds was rather fit myself and could do moves that others couldn't at that size. I went for a take-down in the first period, missed and was taken down myself. I quickly reversed that, lifted him over my head and then body slammed Fairey. This got me a warning by the referee, but certainly upset my opponent more. The next period I pinned him in about 20 seconds. This was one of my greatest adolescent victories. I never forgot his name, but I doubt if he remembered mine. However, I do not think that this personal triumph ever effected Senior Fairey's medical practice or Shepherd's art career.
In a life is stranger than fiction episode: Shepherd Fairey was supposedly arrested in Boston on Friday night, February 6, 2009, on two outstanding warrants. He has been arrested 14 times in the past for willful destruction of property and graffiti. Fairey was about to enter the ICA to dj an event. Does this give Shepherd Fairey additional street cred or is it just a publicity stunt? Either way, the artist knows how to get attention for his art.
Fairey arrested prior to ICA opening event.
Fairey Sues A.P. Over Obama Image