In 1992, Fairey graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration.In addition to his successful graphic design career, Fairey also DJ's at many clubs under the name DJ Diabetic and Emcee Insulin, as he is a diabetic.
After graduation, he founded a small printing business in Providence, called Alternate Graphics, specializing in t-shirt and sticker silkscreens, which afforded Fairey the ability to continue pursuing his own artwork. Fairey was also a founding partner along with Dave Kinsey and Phillip DeWolff of the design studio BLK/MRKT Inc. from 1997-2003 which specialised in guerrilla marketing, and "the development of high-impact marketing campaigns". Clients included Pepsi, Hasbro and Netscape.
Shepard Fairey has developed into one of the most influential street artists of our time. Despite breaking many of the spoken and unspoken rules of contemporary art and culture, his work is now seen in museums and galleries, as well as the worlds of graphic design and signature apparel. His multi-faceted, open-ended and generous artistic practice actively resists categorization. Building off of precedents set by artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Fairey shifts easily between the realms of fine, commercial, and even political art.
Fairey has developed a successful career through expropriating and recontextualizing the artworks of others, which in and of itself does not make for bad art. (he was inflenced by Roy Lichtenstein whom based artworks on the world of American comic strips and advertising imagery).
His multi-layered renderings of counter-cultural revolutionaries and rap, punk and rock stars, as well as updated and re-imagined propaganda-style posters, carry his signature graphic style, marked by his frequent use of black, white, and red.
[ Left: Meeting - Vladimir Kozlinsky. Linocut. 1919. Kozlinsky’s depiction of workers listening to a revolutionary agitator. Middle top: Fairey’s plagiarized version of Kozlinsky’s linocut. Right: Have You Volunteered? - Dmitry Moor. Famous recruitment poster for the Soviet Red Army. 1920. Middle bottom: Fairey’s plagiarized version of Moor’s Red Army poster.
Fairey launched his career with a series of obscure street posters,stickers and stencils that combined the words "Andre the Giant Has aPosse" with the visage of deceased wrestling superstar, Andre the Giant. By the early 1990’s the incomprehensible images had become ubiquitous in major urban centers around the world, but in 1993 Titan Sports, Inc. (now World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.) threatened to sue Fairey for violating their trademarked name, Andre the Giant.
Fairey’s self-titled "absurdist propaganda" campaign was born. The supposed intent of the project, according to the artist, was to: "stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the campaign and their relationship with their surroundings - because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaganda for which the motive is not obvious."
[ Left: Political power comes from the barrel of a gun - Artist unknown. 1968. Chinese poster from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution period. The title of this poster quotes the famous pronouncement made by Mao Tse-Tung. Right: Fairey's plagiarized version titled, Guns and Roses. The Chinese poster's central motif of hands bearing machine guns was plainly digitally scanned without any alteration. Fairey, or his assistants, then applied a modified sun-burst background, placed clip-art roses in the gun barrels, and released the imitation in 2006 as a supposed original work.]
[ Left: Fairey’s plagiarized poster. Right: Original street poster from Czechoslovakia’s, Prague Spring - Artist unknown 1968. The poster depicts a Soviet Red Army soldier in 1945 as a liberator, then as an oppressor in 1968.]
Fairey has incorporated Art Nouveau borders and graphic flourishes in many of his posters. Another example of Fairey’s plagiarism exists in his directly stealing the work of Austrian artist Koloman Moser (1868-1918), Fairey merely altered Moser’s original work with some clumsy border enhancements, a small portrait of Andre the Giant, and the words, "OBEY Propaganda".
Fairey openly admits to directly copying an image created by someone else (he calls this "referencing")
Perhaps the most important falsehood concerning Fairy's behavior is that it is motivated by some grand theory of aesthetics or weighty political philosophy - but it’s also not impossible to view Fairey’s work as right-wing in essence, since it largely ransacks leftist history and imagery while the artist laughs all the way to the bank.........
but,
there are those who say that artists should have the right to alter and otherwise modify already existing works in order to produce new ones or to make pertinent statements.
The Institute of Contemporary Art said in a statement Saturday that "we believe Shepard Fairey has made an important contribution in the history of art and to popular thinking about art and its role in society."
and at the end of the day his work is visually exciting and striking, it is influential and inspiring, and if anything reflects the very nature of current society.
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