Shepard Fairey

Frank Shepard Fairey was born on February 15, 1970, in Charleston, South Carolina. He graduated from Idyllwild Arts Academy in 1988 and earned a BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1992. While still a student at RISD, he launched Andre the Giant Has a Posse, a sticker and graphic-image campaign that established the foundational methods he would carry throughout his career: repetition, public placement, appropriation, and the visual logic of propaganda. That project evolved into the sustained OBEY Giant campaign — spanning stickers, posters, screen prints, murals, and clothing — which transformed a street-level intervention into a global visual system connecting Fairey's practice to branding, public space, mass reproduction, and political persuasion.

Fairey's reach extended decisively into the political mainstream with HOPE in 2008, an offset-printed portrait of Barack Obama that became one of the most culturally consequential political images of the early twenty-first century, bringing street art and activist print culture into a national presidential campaign. The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., acquired the work in 2009. A companion piece, Progress, also from 2008, entered the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as did the three-part We the People series — We the People—Are Greater Than Fear, We the People—Defend Dignity, and We the People—Protect Each Other — all produced in 2017 and extending Fairey's activist printmaking into a collective civic campaign addressing immigration, nationalism, and democratic participation. His work is also held by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.

Over more than three decades, Fairey has mounted solo exhibitions across an exceptionally wide geographic range. Institutional presentations have included Supply & Demand: 20 Year Survey at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Force Majeure at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, EYES OPEN, MINDS OPEN at the Lotte Museum of Art in Seoul, Three Decades of Dissent at Musei In Comune Roma, Your Eyes Here at CAC Málaga Museum, and OBEY: The Art of Shepard Fairey at Fabbrica Del Vapore in Milan. Gallery exhibitions have taken his work to venues including Galerie Itinerrance in Paris, Subliminal Projects and Library Street Collective in Los Angeles, Underdogs Gallery in Lisbon, StolenSpace Gallery in London, and Opera Gallery in both Dubai and Singapore, among many others. Recent and forthcoming projects include Swan Song at Galerie Itinerrance in 2024, One Earth at 212 Gallery in Aspen and Fractured at Harman Projects x Toyroom Gallery in San Francisco in 2025, and New Day Rising at ABV Gallery in Atlanta in 2026. A major retrospective, Facing the Giant — 3 Decades of Dissent, is scheduled at Auburn University from January 20 to May 9, 2026.