During the last presidential election, artist Shepard Fairey’s poster of Barack Obama—a graphic, vaguely Russian-propagandist-looking portrait of the then candidate with the word HOPE drawn in big, bold letters underneath—achieved the rare feat of becoming a visual emblem of a moment in American history. Obama, of course, won the election.
But the ensuing 18 months have been transformative for Fairey, too. Up until a couple of years ago, he was best known in the skateboarding and street-art worlds for his Obey Giant campaign. Conceived while Fairey was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the project involved stickering, stenciling, and painting slogans such as THIS IS YOUR GOD and images of the late professional wrestler Andre the Giant in public spaces in major cities around the globe. But while the Obama poster—as well as a diverse, complex, and at times controversial body of work that stretches back two decades—helped set the stage for Fairey’s first solo museum show, titled Supply and Demand, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston last year, it also attracted a different kind of attention. Early last year, Fairey became embroiled in a contentious—and potentially precedent-setting—lawsuit with the Associated Press over his unauthorized use of one of the news service’s photographs, which was taken by photographer Mannie Garcia in 2006, as a reference for the Obama portrait. In a nutshell: The AP claims that Fairey’s use of the image is copyright infringement; Fairey believes that in making the portrait, he was just exercising his First Amendment rights and that his use of the image as a reference falls under the category of fair use. Fairey’s admission in late fall that he attempted to destroy evidence of his using the Garcia image as a reference has thrown a new wrinkle into the proceedings.
Fairey’s work, which combines elements of graffiti, pop art, business art, appropriation art, and Marxist theory, has long been divisive. His supporters point to the viral nature of his images, the DIY ethic behind his operation, and the brute cultural impact of his work. His critics have accused him of everything from being the proverbial sell out (Fairey produces a clothing line, Obey, as a commercial extension of the Obey Giant project, and has done work for Pepsi and others) to exploiting politically charged imagery (pieces have depicted Black Panthers and Zapatistas) to too closely appropriating the work of other artists and hastening the over-commercialization of street culture. But Fairey, now 40, remains ambivalent about both achieving art-world validation and retaining his street cred, aware that artists whose works hang in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.—as his own Obama portrait does—aren’t necessarily insiders, but they are no longer outsiders, either.
This month, Fairey has a new show at New York City’s Deitch Projects—the last show at the gallery before owner Jeffrey Deitch packs up and heads west to assume his new post as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Iggy Pop recently spoke with the Charleston, South Carolina–born Fairey, who was putting some finishing touches on pieces for the Deitch exhibition in his Los Angeles studio.
IGGY POP: I wanted to start out by talking to you about the biggest mess you’ve created, which is the Barack Obama piece you made in the run-up to the last election. My first thought was that it reminded me a little of something I would have seen in the Middle East—you know, the kind of simple picture of a leader that you see go up when there’s going to be civil unrest or when they die. What were you thinking when you made that image?
SHEPARD FAIREY: I created the Obama image with a little bit of a different intention than a lot of other stuff that I make. It’s not that I haven’t put people who I admire on pedestals before, but they were usually people like the members of Black Sabbath or the Black Panthers. I’ve also made a lot of political art in the past where I was criticizing people like George W. Bush—I worked very hard in 2004 to make anti-Bush imagery. But then Bush got reelected, and so I thought I needed to reevaluate my approach to mainstream politics. At that point, I’d had a kid, a daughter, and as the 2008 election campaign was beginning, I had a second daughter on the way. So I started to think, “This isn’t about me augmenting my existing brand of pissed-off rebellion. This is about my daughters’ future.” I wanted it to have a stylistic connection to my other work, so I didn’t use the typical red, white, and blue—I used the red that I use, and that cream background, and then I worked with different shades of blue so the image had that patriotic feel. I wanted to make an image that deracialized Obama, where he’s not a black man, but a nationalized man. And then, secondly, when a person is turned into a stylized or idealized icon, it means that someone has decided that the person is worthy of this treatment, and the viewer then maybe takes a step back and says, “Well, they’ve been validated by someone, so maybe I should look at them a little more closely and decide whether they’re worthy of that validation.” So my thinking was that if people took that step, then I was pretty sure that they would want Obama to be president. His opposition to the war in Iraq when it was an unpopular position, his stands on health-care reform and the environment and decreasing the power of lobbyists—those were all things that resonated with me.
POP: And yet you had the good sense not to reference any of those issues in the piece itself, because it wouldn’t have had the impact.
FAIREY: Yeah, well, I hate to say this, and some people might get very angry, but the American public is generally pretty superficial, so an image like that just allows them to project whatever limited idea they have onto it. Obviously, not everyone is like that—I actually think there were a lot of people who were bummed by the image because they felt it was shallow propaganda.
