On the 20th anniversary of the Obey Giant campaign, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens the first museum survey of Shepard Fairey, the influential street artist who created the now iconic Obama poster. Stickers and posters of the artist’s work have appeared on street signs and buildings around the world as part of a guerrilla art campaign of global scale.
Featuring about 200 works, “Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand” traces the artist’s career over 20 years, from the Obey Giant stencil to screen prints of political revolutionaries and rock stars to recent mixed-media works and a new mural commissioned for the ICA show.
In complement to the exhibition, Fairey will be creating public art works at sites around Boston. On view at the ICA February 6 to August 16, “Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand” is accompanied by an expanded, limited edition version of Supply & Demand , the retrospective publication of the artist’s work.
“Shepard Fairey’s powerful and varied body of work has reached into all aspects of our visual culture, from political posters to T-shirts and album covers, and now museum installations,” said Jill Medvedow, director of the ICA. “His integration of design, popular culture and politics places him in the current of artistic and cultural forces that shape our world today.”
“The content of Fairey’s work is a call to action about hierarchies and abuses of power, politics and the commodification of culture,” said Pedro H. Alonzo, who co-curated the ICA exhibition with Emily Moore Brouillet. “Fairey is committed to creating work that has meaning for his audience †by using familiar cultural iconography that people can relate to and by constantly bringing his work into the public sphere.”
Fairey gained international recognition in the early 1990s with his Obey Giant campaign, seen on streets around the world through the countless stickers and posters that Fairey produced and disseminated. Since then, Fairey has created works of art of all types †on the street, as part of commercial collaborations and, increasingly, for gallery presentation. Fairey has broken many of the spoken and unspoken rules of contemporary art and culture. Working as a “fine” artist, commercial artist, graphic designer and businessman, Fairey actively resists categorization.
Through the Obey project, he has created a cultural phenomenon, but more importantly, a new model of art making and production. He builds off precedents set by artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, as he disrupts expectations about art and business, and muddies the distinctions between fine art and commercial art.
“Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand” features work in a wide variety of media †screen prints, stencils, stickers, rubylith illustrations, collages and works on wood, metal and canvas. These works reflect the diversity of Fairey’s aesthetic, displaying a variety of influences and references such as Soviet propaganda, psychedelic rock posters, images of Americana and the layering and weathering of street art. While his visually seductive imagery draws in his audience, Fairey uses his work as a platform to make statements on social issues important to him.
The retrospective exhibition examines prevailing themes in Fairey’s work, including Anti-War/Peace, Hierarchies of Power, Leaders of Change, Music, Excesses of Capitalism, and Activism.
Fairey was born in Charleston, S.C., in 1970 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a BA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1991. He has had recent solo exhibitions at White Walls Gallery, San Francisco, 2008; Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles, 2007; Jonathan Levine Gallery, New York, 2007; Stolen Space, London, 2007; and Galerie Magda Danysz, Paris 2006. His work is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.
Fairey is also the founder of Studio Number One, a graphic design company.
The Institute of Contemporary Art is at 100 Northern Avenue. For information, www.icaboston.org or 617-478-3100.
