Shepard FAIREY

Shepard Fairey (OBEY Giant): Biography and Original Screenprints

Shepard Fairey (born Frank Shepard Fairey in Charleston, South Carolina, on 15 February 1970) is the American artist behind OBEY Giant, the stencilled face that began as a student joke and became one of the most recognisable images in contemporary street art. Based in Los Angeles, he works across murals, stickers, posters and canvases, but his most widely collected output is the screenprint: hundreds of signed and numbered editions issued directly to the public, a practice that places him squarely in the history of the democratic, affordable print.

Le Coin des Arts currently offers two groups of Fairey screenprints: the Interpolation diptych (2014) and Writing on the Wall (Cream) (2010), the cream colourway of an image released on 28 January 2010 in an edition of 300, measuring 18 × 24 inches. Each sheet has been chosen for the freshness of its colour, the condition of the paper and a clear history.

Early years, skateboarding and art school

Fairey came to art through skateboarding: by 1984 he was putting his own drawings on boards and T-shirts. After the Porter-Gaud School in Charleston he finished his schooling at Idyllwild Arts Academy in California in 1988, and the same year enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, graduating with a BFA in Illustration in 1992. In 1989, while showing a friend how to cut a stencil, he used a newspaper advertisement for a wrestling bout to make a portrait of André the Giant. Run off as stickers captioned ‘Andre the Giant Has a Posse’, the image spread across Providence and beyond. After graduating he set up Alternate Graphics, a small screenprinting business in Providence, which gave him the technical grounding his later editions rely on.

From sticker campaign to studio

In 1996 Fairey simplified the wrestler’s face and replaced the text with a single word, OBEY, taken from John Carpenter’s film They Live. The campaign became a sly commentary on propaganda and advertising, and the visual language he built around it, in red, black and cream with halftone screens and echoes of propaganda posters, Constructivism and Art Nouveau, remains consistent to this day. He was a founding partner of the design agency BLK/MRKT from 1997 to 2003 and in 2003 founded Studio Number One with his wife, Amanda Fairey. The OBEY Clothing label grew out of the same sticker campaign.

‘Hope’ and the first museum survey

Fairey’s portrait of Barack Obama for the 2008 presidential campaign, soon captioned Hope, made his name far beyond street culture; in January 2009 the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington acquired it for its permanent collection. The image was based on an Associated Press photograph by Mannie Garcia; the resulting copyright dispute was settled out of court in January 2011, and in 2012 Fairey pleaded guilty to criminal contempt for having destroyed evidence in the case. In 2009 the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston gave him his first museum exhibition, Supply & Demand (6 February – 16 August 2009), which then travelled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

Fairey in London and in British collections

The Victoria and Albert Museum holds an early Fairey screenprint, Obey Propaganda Pasting Services (also titled ‘Oldschool Pasters’), made in 2000, numbered 127 from an edition of 140 and registered under museum number E.364-2006. It is a telling acquisition: the V&A collected Fairey as a printmaker and poster designer, not merely as a muralist. In London he is closely associated with StolenSpace Gallery in east London, which staged Sound & Vision from 20 October to 4 November 2012, taking its title from the David Bowie song; the exhibition was billed as his second major show in the capital, after a collaboration in 2007. Music runs through his imagery: the design of Writing on the Wall is based on a photograph by his friend Jim Jocoy, published in We’re Desperate, Jocoy’s book of late-1970s punk photography.

Paris, Berlin and public art since 2012

Continental Europe has given Fairey some of his most prominent walls. In Paris, working with Galerie Itinerrance, he painted murals in the 13th arrondissement from 2012, including Delicate Balance and the large Marianne, ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ (both 2016), a tribute to the victims of the attacks of 13 November 2015. During COP21 in December 2015 his eight-metre globe Earth Crisis hung inside the Eiffel Tower. In Berlin he painted Make Art Not War on Mehringplatz in Kreuzberg in September 2014 for Urban Nation, and in Spain the CAC Málaga devoted the exhibition Your Eyes Here to him in 2015.

The OBEY Giant print releases

Fairey’s editioned screenprints are sold through online ‘print releases’ on obeygiant.com, announced in advance and priced modestly. The standard format is 18 × 24 inches, often on mottled cream Speckletone paper, and an image is frequently issued in several colourways, each with its own edition. Two examples show the pattern: in August 2012 Love Is the Drug appeared in signed and numbered editions of 200 and 400 at $45, released at two random times on the day; in March 2018 both colourways of Tunnel Vision were issued in signed and numbered editions of 400 on cream Speckletone. Alongside these come large-format prints, letterpress pieces and more ambitious projects such as the Hand-Painted Multiples and relief prints published by Pace Prints in New York in 2012 and 2015. There is, as far as we know, no printed catalogue raisonné; collectors rely on the obeygiant.com archive and the community-run database thegiant.org, which records release dates, edition sizes and original prices. See what is an original print.

Collecting Shepard Fairey prints: a buyer’s guide

Edition and numbering. Limited editions are numbered in pencil. Check the figure against the published release details; a mismatch is a warning sign. See the printing.

Colourway. Because one image may exist in red, cream, blue or gold, the exact version should be named. Writing on the Wall, for instance, was issued in red and cream on the same day.

Signature. Editioned screenprints are signed by hand in pencil. Offset posters and open editions are unsigned or carry a printed signature. See the signature.

Condition. Cream stock yellows in daylight, and posted prints often suffer from creased corners or handling dents; dense black areas scuff easily. Ask for images of the edges and use UV-filtering glazing when framing.

Provenance. An original OBEY Giant receipt, a gallery invoice or an auction record adds real value in a fast-moving secondary market.

Pitfalls. Stickers, offset posters and digital reproductions are not original screenprints, and added signatures circulate online. Treat any signature on an item never issued as a limited edition with suspicion. Our commitments are set out on our authenticity page.

Our selection of Shepard Fairey screenprints favours well-preserved sheets with accurate descriptions. You may also enjoy the work of Invader, JonOne, Roy Lichtenstein, Yayoi Kusama and Robert Combas, as well as our pages on contemporary art and engravings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Supply and Demand: The Art of Shepard Fairey, 2006 · Covert to Overt, Rizzoli, 2015 · V&A – Obey Propaganda Pasting Services, 2000 · Artlyst – Sound & Vision, StolenSpace, 2012 · OBEY Giant – Earth Crisis, Eiffel Tower · Galerie Itinerrance – Murals in Paris · Pace Prints – Shepard Fairey · thegiant.org – Writing on the Wall Cream · The Blot Says – Love Is the Drug, 2012