Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey is the man behind OBEY GIANT, the graphics that have changed the way people see art and the urban landscape. What started with an absurd sticker he created in 1989 while a student at the Rhode Island School of Design has since evolved into a worldwide street art campaign.

Fairey’s art reached a new height of prominence in 2008, when his "HOPE" portrait of Barack Obama became the iconic image of the presidential campaign and helped inspire an unprecedented political movement. The original image now hangs in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

In 2009, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston honored Fairey with a full-scale solo retrospective, Supply and Demand. The show will tour the country through 2010. His work has also been exhibited in such museums and collections as The New Museum of Design, New York; the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, New Castle, UK; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.