Sunday, October 31, 2010

Artist Post #9

Artist Post #9
November 1, 2010

Shepard Fairey



Relation: I have finally started to find some artists that really relate to what I'm trying to do. Through various works and through various mediums, Shepard Fairey has successfully spread messages. He has began "experiments" that took off in a huge way and became giant public art pieces run by individual people. His art, sometimes called "street art" is based on the idea that a message can take off outside of gallery walls. I am newly excited by his work and the amount of success he had with it outside the art world. One of the slogans (borrowed from Marshall McLuhan) that Fairey uses frequently is "The Medium is the Message."



Biography: Shepard Fairey is a graphic designer and an illustrator. He grew up in Charleston, South Carolina and attended the Idyllwild Arts Academy as well as the Rhode Island School of Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration. He began placing drawings on Tshirts and skateboards and sending them out into the skateboarding community. He became most well-known for his "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" (OBEY) sticker campaign. In this campaign he appropriated images from supermarket tabloids and the stickers took off around the world. The more recent Barak Obama "HOPE" poster made Institute of Contemporary Art call him "one of today's best known and most influential street artists."


Quotes:
"When I started to see reactions and consider the sociological forces at work surrounding the use of public space and the insertion of a very eye-catching but ambiguous image, I began to think there was the potential to create a phenomenon."

"I became obsessed with the idea of spreading the image further and was surprised by how many people were willing to spread the stickers to other cities based on the template established in Providence or an explanation of the concept."

Source for both:
Fairey, Shepard. Intervew by Stephen Heller. 04 Jun 2004. AIGA. Web. 31 Oct 2010. .




Links:
Interview
Artist Website
Gallery

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