Rise Above: The Art of Shepard Fairey

Many moons ago, in my former life as an art school nerd, I spent the summer at the Rhode Island School of Design.  There, in what I look back upon as the largest collection of hipster art nerds, I came across the work of Shepard Fairey. 

The idea in its earliest incarnations was very simple.  Fairey loved Andre The Giant.  He loved him so much, he made stickers about him with his statistics on them and claimed boldly: Andre the Giant has a Posse.

At the time, the stickers were all over Providence.  Fairey created the idea while at RISD in the late 80s and mailed all of his friends all over the world the stickers to place on light poles, walls, college campuses, shady bathrooms, etc.  Most likely, you have seen his work all over the place and you probably didn't even know it.  It's street art at its best.

His work has become a lot more stylized and iconic over the years, taking the idea of obeying Andre the Giant and encorporating that into other iconic figures such as Mao, Stalin, and even a couple of our current President. 

Wiki tells it best:  "the campaign parodies government sponsored propaganda by invoking Orwellian language (e.g. "OBEY") and the artistic style of Soviet propaganda posters. These styles are strongly associated with the spread of misinformation, and paired with the André the Giant image indicating the joke nature of the message, reinforce the idea that governments have methods to spread misinformation."

His work is beautiful and will be shown at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery starting September 16th through October 14th. 

The Merry Karnowsky Gallery is located at 170 S. La Brea Ave. 

Obey!

Comments

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It is hard to say such a thing is clear.

Significant change, it is.
I saw on the news that the money they dumped at Shire was fake, to represent the money he had raised. It wasn't the actual money.

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Significant change, it is.
I saw on the news that the money they dumped at Shire was fake, to represent the money he had raised. It wasn't the actual money.

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I saw on the news that the money they dumped at Shire was fake, to represent the money he had raised.

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