![Shepard Fairey leads something of a double life – a vandal-artist feted by the people and the galleries, then snatched ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170615061204im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/a/k/9/x/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gwad11.png/1495864295510.jpg)
In late 2007, a presidential hopeful from Illinois acquired some serious street cred.
Seemingly overnight, posters of the senator materialised in cities across the US. His face was rendered in red, white and blue, looking confidently beyond the confines of the picture to an imagined future. In its most widely distributed form, the image featured a single word in a no-nonsense typeface: "HOPE".
![Shepard Fairey at work.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170615061204im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/b/1/w/l/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gwad11.png/1495864295510.jpg)
The Obama "Hope" poster not only become synonymous with Barack Obama's ultimately successful presidential campaign, it captured the mood of an era. A version has been acquired by The Smithsonian; The New Yorker described the art work as "the most efficacious American political illustration since 'Uncle Sam Wants You'."
Shepard Fairey, the 47-year-old Los Angeles-based artist behind "Hope", says it took about a day to knock up. "It's not a particularly daring image," he says, a trifle apologetically. The colours – red, white and blue, but not quite the red, white and blue of the flag – were carefully selected, though. "Like, hey, we're behind this guy, we're patriotic, but on our terms, you know – that's kind of what I was going for," he says. "The palette of the flag is just too loud and immediately suggests a pick-up truck with a gun rack."
![Shepard Fairey's iconic "Hope" poster became synonymous with Barack Obama's presidential campaign.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170615061204im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/a/k/7/g/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gwad11.png/1495864295510.jpg)
In June, Fairey will be in Sydney for the Vivid Sydney festival. With a crew of helpers, he'll be splashing the side of 309 George Street with a pro-peace mural, dominated by a beatific female figure, 50 metres high and 30 metres wide. Fairey has been undertaking similar large-scale mural projects all over the world since 2010; the one in Sydney will be his largest to date.
Students of art history eyeing Fairey's murals may detect the striking colours and geometries of Russian constructivism. Fairey, a music lover and sometime DJ, occasionally describes his art as the visual equivalent of a track by Public Enemy, Bob Marley or the Clash.
"A lot of artists are way too sedate for me," he says. "When somebody walks around a corner and sees one of my pieces unexpectedly, I want the style of the image, the content of the image, the placement of the image" – he pounds a fist against the palm of his other hand – "to really hit them."
Fairey's murals are street art, technically. But their slick splendour is a far cry from the street art with which Fairey first made his name, climbing up drainpipes and scrambling over rooftops, terrorising street poles and the sides of buildings in Boston and New York.
![Shepard Fairey created this original illustration, which combines digital art and hand drawing, in a world exclusive for ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170615061204im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/b/3/4/9/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gwad11.png/1495864295510.jpg)
First and foremost, Fairey was – and still is, judging by the ongoing case against him for malicious destruction of property – an illegal street artist. For nearly three decades, his best work has taken the form of "street bombing": unlawfully pasting, spraying and stickering the cityscape with subversive imagery. He practised his art at night, armed with a spray can or a bucket of wheat paste, evading (mostly) the police.
Even though street art has become a more respected medium art form in recent years, Fairey still leads something of a double life – a vandal-artist navigating the underground and the above-ground, feted by a city and then snatched up by its cops. Every new story on the artist requires an update to the running tally of his arrests (currently at 18).
![<i>Lotus Woman</i>](http://web.archive.org./web/20170615061204im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/b/3/d/2/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gwad11.png/1495864295510.jpg)
"Well, I mean, the thing about the street is, I have a love-hate relationship with the chaos of it," he says. It's not only the looming threat of the law that gets to Fairey. "Sometimes you do something and it's ripped off, painted over, tagged on, within hours. All that effort to have maybe only the person that cleans it see it?"
On the other hand, the chaos is part of the attraction. Street art has a way of making the kind that is displayed in galleries and museums feel elite and sterile by comparison.
Without hope you won't act. The silver lining of Trump being elected is that he's so extreme that there's a potential to activate a huge swath of the population that was pretty apathetic before now.
Shepard Fairey
"One of the reasons I was drawn to street art is because it's visceral, accessible, democratic. The Marshall McLuhan phrase, 'the medium is the message' really applies, because when you see something on the street, there's a mystery to it. It's implicit that there's an act of defiance, that there's a rebellion to it. Even when the content is apolitical, the act is political."
Around the corner from Sunset Boulevard, Fairey's office looks like a place a teenager with expensive tastes might hang out. There are records all over the place, racks of CDs, stacks of books, a skateboard, ornamental grenades and a homemade screen-printed Metallica T-shirt from Fairey's teenage days. There are a couple of Banksys on walls intensely crowded with edgy art ("Smart guy," says Fairey, of Banksy. "We used to hang out, but he's such a recluse now"), plus a pretty authentic-looking anti-graffiti street sign. There's also the Shepard Fairey original known as Andre the Giant Has a Posse, the newspaper clipping stencil that started it all – on the back of it, a crudely scrawled 28-year-old note from a roommate (something about enchiladas).
![<i>Megaphone</i>](http://web.archive.org./web/20170615061204im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/b/3/d/4/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gwad11.png/1495864295510.jpg)
It's possible to trace Fairey's affinity with the urban environment back to his youth. As an avid street-skater, he learned to examine his surroundings for wheel-worthy handrails, stairs and embankments. "You're looking at the city with a completely different eye and set of criteria. That way of really, really scouring the landscape just crossed right over into street art."
In 1989, living in Providence and studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, Fairey admired pop-art luminaries such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, but was equally inspired by the in-your-face output of skate-culture artists Jim Phillips, Vernon Courtlandt Johnson and Pushead – all flying cartoon eyeballs and gruesome skulls. He absorbed a sense of political rebellion from music: the Clash, Bob Marley, the Dead Kennedys. Today, the Clash's anti-conformist anthem The Magnificent Seven – "a Marxist disco song", Fairey calls it – is a staple of his DJ sets.
![<i>Bomber</i>](http://web.archive.org./web/20170615061204im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/b/3/e/v/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gwad11.png/1495864295510.jpg)
Discovering the work of Robbie Conal (that gnarly portrait of Ronald Reagan) and Barbara Kruger (weapon-words slapped onto monochrome photographs) alerted Fairey to the dynamite potential of politically charged art. "I was activated," he says.
At 19, he started making and distributing stickers of the Andre the Giant Has a Posse image. It was an inside joke, or half-joke, about skater crews, but it spread and escalated rapidly.
The following year, Fairey hijacked a billboard in Providence, replacing the mug of a mayoral candidate with Andre's imposing visage. It was Fairey's creative solution to a class assignment (initially, his editorial illustration teacher was unmoved. "So, you took a picture of a billboard?" "No," Fairey said. "I did the billboard"). It soon became so much more.
"Going that big, an intervention like that, starts to raise a lot more questions," he says. "I realised that the challenge of getting to a spot, when there's some degree of courage and will embedded in the end result – that can inspire people. It's always been about empowerment for me."
What began as absurdist pranksterism gradually sharpened into social commentary. Fairey paired the leaden gaze of Andre the Giant with the command "OBEY". Suddenly, it was threatening and Orwellian, an ironically ubiquitous reminder to question power and authority. Fairey did pull-ups so he had the strength to pull himself up over walls and coat increasingly out-of-the-way places with the message.
"There were some situations where I was on a roof and tiles started to come out, and I've started sliding, with a two or three-storey drop over the side. I've never actually fallen off. But I've been in some hairy situations."
Between 1989 and 1996, Fairey estimates, about one million hand-cut "Obey" stickers were disseminated and stuck to surfaces around the world – a quiet, sticky revolution of sorts.
During the Bush administration in the early 2000s, Fairey's street-art activism became more overt and targeted, some would say heavy-handed: Bush with Hitler moustache, Bush as vampire, Bush cradling warhead. "If you're already going to take the risk to do something without permission," Fairey realised, "you may as well take the risk of saying something that people may not like. You're most likely going to be hated and potentially in trouble anyway."
So far, Fairey's Trump-era imagery has employed a different tone. Before Donald Trump's inauguration in January, Fairey produced a series of pro-diversity, pro-harmony posters, highlighting Native American, African-American, Muslim and Latino women, making the images available to download from his website as part of a campaign called "We the People". The posters could be glimpsed held aloft at the women's marches in January (Fairey and family marched in LA) and the protests against Trump's immigration ban. Clearly, Fairey still believes in the power of images to unite and galvanise.
"It's pretty much a kill-them-with-kindness approach," he says. "This is the antidote to the anger and fear and hatred that just creates division. It's common human ground, and a respect for diversity and human dignity. That's what's really important right now. I'm always going to be making images that remind people that we're all in this together."
In 2010, The Colbert Report's Stephen Colbert interviewed Fairey. "How's that 'hope' working out for you now?" Colbert asked. Months into Trump's presidency a version of that same question gives Fairey pause.
"It's discouraging," he says. "But it doesn't make me hopeless. Because without hope you won't act. The silver lining of Trump being elected is that he's so extreme that there's a potential to activate a huge swath of the population that was pretty apathetic before now. It has the potential to wake a lot of people up."
Having two young daughters, Fairey is less cavalier in his wall-climbing, street-bombing exploits than he once was, and even more hopeful for the future. "Kids are a big deal. I'm not just thinking about the short term, I'm thinking about what kind of world they're growing up in and they're going to inherit. And having kids makes you think about not only your kids but everyone else's too. It sensitises you."
The cultural phenomenon of "Hope", apart from helping an Illinois senator get elected president, ushered Fairey into a new phase of his career – one that allowed him to reach more eyeballs than ever. He has finally been able to turn down the corporate graphic design gigs he had taken to fund his street art, devoting more of his energies to getting his messages out there, using every platform at his disposal – strictly legal and otherwise.
"I make a lot of things I think hold up as highbrow art, but that's not what I'm interested in. If I'm pulling somebody that's never been part of that conversation into it, that's what I'm excited about. All that work is reaching people who never felt politics was a conversation they could be a part of. If I can be a young person's version of what the Clash, Bob Marley, Dead Kennedys, were to me …? Hell, yeah. That's what I want to do."
Shepard Fairey draws for Spectrum
Spectrum's cover this week is an original illustration by Shepard Fairey, a combination of digital art and hand drawing created especially for the occasion. The work – a world exclusive – is part of Fairey's latest series exploring peace, harmony and the environment, the centrepiece of which will be a public mural painted in Sydney's George Street for Vivid Sydney.
Shepard Fairey will speak at Sydney Town Hall on June 17. He will be painting his mural at 309 George Street, city, June 12-17. An exhibition of his works is at Darling Quarter until June 17. See vividsydney.com.