p 28 | BIGISSUE.COM 09-15 MARCH 2020
‘ IF SHEPARD FAIREY COMES
TO YOUR TOWN, EVERY
SINGLE GRAFFITI WRITER
GETS UPTIGHT’
The Big Issue: When did you start the Obey sticker campaign and
how old were you?
Shepard Fairey: I started it in 1989 at age 19, the summer a�ter my
freshman year of art college at Rhode Island School of Design.What where your in�luences at the time?
I was really into skateboarding, punk rock, and hip-hop, but I had
also recently become fascinated with gra�fi ti culture like tags,
pieces, and stickers. I had been making homemade stickers and
T-shirts with stencils and screenprinting in high school, but gra�fi ti
made me think about how I could use those techniques for art I
could put up on the streets.How did that image [Obey Giant, above right] come about?
I was looking for an image to teach a friend how to make a stencil
and came across a wrestling ad with Andre the Giant in it. I thoughtAndre was a fascinating character and could make a memorable
stencil, but this was really just a spontaneous choice. My friend Eric
tried to cut the stencil but got frustrated, so I fi nished it and made
the stickers with Andre’s height and weight and the text “Andre the
Giant Has a Posse”, which was a reference to hip-hop slang for ‘crew’
or ‘gang’ in a lot of the songs of that era.At what point did you decide this was going to become your
signature – and the drive behind something that is now a global
campaign? Street art doyen Roger Gastman tells stories of
long-distance road trips across America...
The sticker campaign started as an inside joke with a few friends,
but as it seemed to intrigue people outside of my social and
cultural circle, I became fascinated by the power of an unusual
image in public space to disrupt the usual �low of consumer culture
communication and question the control of public space. A�ter aSHEPARD FAIREY'S ICONIC POSTER MADE OBAMA
A PRESIDENT, AND HIM A GLOBAL NAME. BUT IT'S
A MUCH SIMPLER SET OF GUERRILLA STICKERS
THAT MAKES HIM MOST PROUD
— BANKSY