Shepard Fairey: Portrait Of The Artist

shepard fairey: backward forward at Dallas Contemporary in Dallas, Texas, through July 23, 2023, is an expansive solo show of Shepard Fairey’s most recent work that speaks to his evolution as an artist. When I was in Dallas for the opening of the exhibit, I had the chance to sit down with Fairey to hear about his journey and current practice.

Fairey’s work sits at an interesting intersection of American Art, graphic design, advertising, social justice activism, and entrepreneurship.

Throughout his life, Fairey has been driven to express himself with his art but also to find commercial applications of his talent. It is hard to name another artist who has his reach, his influence, his street cred, and his commercial success. Others, such as Bansky, may be bigger Art world stars, and others such as Damien Hirst may have commercialized their work more lucratively, and still others such as Robbie Conal may have remained truer to guerrilla street political art but one would have to look to Keith Haring to find an artist as graphically inspired, commercially minded, politically active and impactful.

Shepard Fairey grew up in South Carolina where since childhood, he says, “I was into drawing and painting and building things.” Fairey’s middle and high school teachers encouraged him to pursue Art, and he spent two summers at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Fairey expected to attend college there but was expelled from the summer program for sneaking out at night to see a girlfriend. A guidance counselor suggested he spend his senior year as a boarder at a new art school in California, the Idyllwild Arts Academy, which accepted him based on a portfolio of his work.

“And so, luckily, something bad turned into something good.” Fairey said. “The school in Idyllwild was the first time I didn't have an adversarial relationship with teachers. And I had great art teachers. I had great academic teachers. And there was just a different culture in California.” For the first time, Fairey was “treated as a peer who needed to be nurtured” rather than a reckless teenager who needed to be managed.

From Idyllwild, Fairey went on to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, where among his teachers were illustrators Chris Van Allsburg and David Macaulay whose books he had as a kid. “Providence ended up being a good place for me because [including] the crowd from Brown, it is very, very culturally diverse and cosmopolitan, [filled with] sophisticated, smart people,” Fairey said, adding, “But it wasn't as hectic as New York City where I might have been distracted.”

Providence was also a great place to hear music. “Every band going between Boston and New York stopped in Providence.” Fairey was passionate about music, particularly punk and hip-hop, and recalled seeing performances by The Ramones, Bad Brains, Jane’s Addiction, Suicidal Tendencies, Primus, and Public Enemy, all of whom impacted Fairey’s own emerging punk aesthetic.

It was at RISD that Fairey first took Art History seriously, where he took note of the cave paintings of Lascaux, religious iconography, and Renaissance portraiture, all of which made an impression on him. But it was modern art that most excited Fairey. “It spoke to me,” he now says. He loved that Impressionist paintings which were so revolutionary in their time now hung in doctor’s offices as posters.

As a person inspired by punk music and Hip-Hop, he loved the idea of the friction between cultural change and technological evolution producing Art, and in particular the way they were re-mixed in the collages of Braque or the work of Marcel Duchamp. And he saw that influence in the posters and album covers done by Jamie Reid for the Sex Pistols. “And, of course,” Fairey says, “Barbara Kruger was a huge influence for me.”

During the summer after his junior year, Fairey launched a screen-printing business in Providence, hoping that would sustain him after graduation while he continued to make his own work. However, the business failed. “I didn't realize that the printing business, unless you're doing high volume, is really, really inefficient, and you can't make money very easily.’

At that point, after graduating RISD in 1992, moving to New York wasn’t viable because he couldn’t afford to live there. Fairey was not just poor, he was in debt. So, when his friend Andy Howell, the pro skateboarder who was an artist (and “a hero of mine” says Fairey) offered Fairey a job in San Diego as production manager for the apparel company Howell had started and told Fairey he could produce his own work under Howell’s umbrella it was, in Fairey’s telling, an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Nonetheless, Fairey found that working in the skateboard industry was “very challenging to make a good living.” By the time he was 26, Fairey thought he was too old for the youth apparel market (Although ironically, Fairey’s clothing company, OBEY, is more successful today than any of those companies he looked up to at 26).

The X Games were bringing skateboarding culture to national audiences. Large corporations chasing the youth market were all hiring street marketing firms in LA, which jibed with Fairey’s graphic talents. “So I moved to LA because almost all the work was coming from LA.”

Fairey recalls two seminal LA events that shaped the direction his work would take. One was an exhibition at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA): “Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955-1962,” that featured work by Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Edward Ruscha and Andy Warhol — all artists who made a strong argument for an art that re-mixed the artifacts of popular culture in inscrutable ways.

Seemingly pegged to the exhibition, street artist Robbie Conal had plastered downtown LA with his images of an exceedingly wrinkled Ronald Reagan framed above and below with the words CONTRA and DICTION. Fairey loved it. “I said, This is awesome. It's got a sense of humor. It's political, it's cool art.” It was McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’. “It's an act of defiance in public space,” Fairey said. “So it's political by its very nature.” That registered. Meanwhile, the Dead Kennedy’s Jello Biafra had released a hardcore punk compilation LP called “Let Them Eat Jellybeans!” that also had Reagan on its cover. “All these things just connected.”

Fairey began to make his own street art, at first mostly stencils of figures from the Sex Pistols or The Clash. Then one day, as Fairey recalls, “I was looking through the newspaper for an image to teach a friend how to make a stencil.” In the paper there was an image of professional wrestler Andre the Giant. A stencil of Andre’s face became a sticker, ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE, which in turn became the wheatpasted posters of Andre with the word OBEY, which would launch Fairey as a street artist.

With Andre, Fairey had found an enigmatic yet easily identifiable image to use for his own guerrilla art project. Andre The Giant Obey Stickers and posters were, to Fairey, very much a Rorschach. “Andre by some is seen as scary and, and intimidating. But people that knew that he had a disease that was going to shorten his life, made him grow disproportionately, so to other people he’s very sad and sympathetic.”

“At the dawn of the internet, you could still have things out in the public that were provocative and mysterious, which is really impossible now,” Fairey said. The ambiguity was important because Fairey hoped that questioning his work would leave the viewer to equally question “what it was in themselves that was responding this way.” It was Fairey’s way of saying “If you're questioning this, you ought to be questioning all that.”

Over the following years, Fairey’s aesthetic evolved into what he has called “Anti-Propaganda propaganda” creating images that express a duality of meanings whose messages were often contradictory and subversive such as flowers whose petals turn out to be guns; or a mandala made of weapons, often rendered in a heroic Russian Constructivist graphic style.

Fairey calls this his “Trojan Horse approach” — using a graphically appealing image which pulls in people of differing opinions, and once invested, hopes to get them to consider Fairey’s message. “There's a rhythm to how they're processing it, that allows them not to just reject [the message] outright. They get to take ownership of the process. They don't feel like I force them.”

At the same time Fairey was refining a style of portraiture compatible with guerrilla street art (often wheatpasted quickly) that was often political. However, in contrast to Conal’s work which was often aggressively critical, Fairey chose to appeal to what President Lincoln called, “The better angels of our nature.” We see this most potently in what has come to be Fairey’s most iconic work, his poster of candidate Barack Obama with the word “Hope.”

About this, Fairey said, “I've always enjoyed portraiture from the time I was a kid. I remember I spent like 50 hours working on this pencil rendering of William Holden with his hands between bars… But it took a long time for me to refine how to selectively focus in a portrait to get the most flattering or powerful elements really well resolved and to eliminate the superfluous elements. That's a process I'm still improving on.”

The Obama “Hope” Poster, which Fairey made independent of the Obama campaign, has gone on to become a classic of political image-making. Since then Fairey has done a number of notable portraits in what has now become his signature style including a giant wall image of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and portraits of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Valarie Kaur, France’s Marianne and, recently, Beto O’Rourke.

However, even as Fairey’s style has become recognizable, he continues to experiment, to innovate, to push at the boundaries of how his work is made and what it communicates. As Fairey has become more successful, he now has a team of workers to execute his large-scale murals and other public works, while freeing more time for Fairey to work on his art. “I’m spending more time on my Art than ever before,” Fairey told me.” And it shows: there is a new level of complexity in the new works on display at the Dallas Contemporary, some of which grew out of an experiment in releasing an edition of NFTs.

“I took 20 of my best known pieces of iconography. A lot of collage backgrounds, geometric elements, textures of brush strokes and spray paint. And then worked with some guys who do AI to have these [elements cropped and] layered in so that every single one of the few thousand NFTs would be different.” This process of combining elements of his work and layering them followed Fairey’s aesthetic guidelines, which they continued to refine to arrive at the final product. However, Fairey was surprised because the AI remixed elements in ways that Fairey had not imagined or would not have come up with and which he was surprised to find worked really well.

“Sometimes you get blinders on as an artist because you're refining and refining and refining,” Fairey said, “So being able to pull back… there can be really, really exciting things that come out of that.”

When it came to his new paintings, Fairey was now inspired to mix and layer in elements and references that he had not considered before and assemble separate canvases together to create what Fairey calls his “Modular Discourse Series.” In the new work, you might think at first that it resembles his signature portrait style but the closer you look at the canvas, the more you see that the paintings are intricately layered and textured. In some of the work, I found references to early Warhol work, as well as a certain details or graphic styles we might find in Fairey’s own earlier work.

“I've always liked the tension between spontaneous chaos and very resolved geometry,” Fairey said. This is even more evident in the new works particularly when the images line up next to each other in accidental and provocative ways. “Part of the four-panel series [was] figuring out those optimizations.”

Fairey calls this level of self-reference and detail his “un-lazy recycle” because it is so concept and labor intensive – a galaxy away from his early work which needed to be made and wheatpasted on walls quickly and which washed away in the rain. These new works are meant to last.

“I want to make these things that somebody could live with and be discovering new things [in the work] for years,” Fairey told me.

What struck me about Fairey in person – and as a public persona – is that he has the right temperament for the job. He is unusually able to deal with the attacks and criticisms and invites the response, whatever it may be.

At the Dallas Contemporary Gala honoring Fairey, Black Flag founder and spoken word artist Henry Rollins spoke of the inspiration Fairey has given him throughout their long friendship. Rollins said: “My admiration for him, his amazing work ethic, and his incredible art only grows as the years go on, and one of my favorite aspects of Shepard is his intellectual courage to let the truth hang out there knowing there’s going to be the resultant slings and arrows coming his way.”

During the early years of his career as a street artist, Fairey was arrested some 18 times by the police for public vandalism or other charges, and was often treated harshly. He has been outspoken in his support of progressive candidates and progressive causes. Yet Fairey’s very success as an artist and in the commercial arena has made him a frequent target for criticism from all sides of the political spectrum, called out for not living up to either side’s standards. If his current public murals are made with his team, he is judged no longer “authentic”; if he flies by plane to an event, he can’t be a true fighter against climate change (he and his wife actually offset their carbon footprint in a number of ways).

Fairey, who is deeply thoughtful on all these issues, invites the criticism: “I’m doing these things to create a conversation and not all conversations are pleasant,” Fairey told me. “And if I were to stop because of the unpleasantness, then I would be failing my own core mission. I would not be true to my belief system. “

“Knowing that when people are feeling uncomfortable, their first reaction rather than to look inward is to lash out,” Fairey acknowledged that meant his work was often the target of their anger. However. Fairey believes a better outcome can come from the confrontation: “It might mean there's some thinking happening,” Fairey said.

Shepard Fairey’s exhibition of new work, backward forward, is on view at Dallas Contemporary through July 23, 2022.