Shepard Fairey
Shepard Fairey Shepard Fairey was born on February 15, 1970. He has emerged as a street artist from the skateboarding scene. He is from Charleston, South Carolina. Shepard Fairey started his art career in 1984, when he put his art on skateboards and T-Shirts. Shepard Fairey went to Idyllwild Arts Academy, and he graduated in 1988. He also attended Rhode Island School of Design, where he graduated with a Bachelors Degree in 1992. His first art exhibition was in the summer of 2009. It was titled Supply and Demand. Shepard Fairey created the Andre the Giant sticker in 1989 and it has grown dramatically due to collaborators duplicating his work. The original sticker has no meaning, says Shepard Fairey, but instead is just there to cause people to question their surroundings. In 1994, Shepard Fairey met Helen Stickler, who had graduated RISD and graduated with a film degree. A documentary was made about Shepard Fairey and his work and released in 1995 at the New York Underground Film Festival. This film was later played at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997 as well. Now it has been featured at over 70 different festivals across the nation. Shepard Fairey’s most current and popular piece is the Obama HOPE poster. The Obama campaign declined to have any direct affiliation with it because the poster had been “perpetrated illegally” by Shepard Fairey. He then made other posters featuring VOTE, PROGRESS, and CHANGE which the Obama campaign accepted. Shepard Fairey distributed over 300,000 stickers and 500,000 shirts during his time making art during the Obama campaign. He said he put all of this money back into making more art so he didn’t keep any of the “Obama”