Shepard Fairey, Gigante, 1997, courtesy of the artist.
Shepard Fairey, War is Over Canvas, 2007, courtesy of the artist.
Shepard Fairey, Mujer Fatal, 2007, courtesy of the artist. |
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Institute
of Contemporary Art
100 Northern Avenue
617-478-3100
Boston
Shepard Fairey:
Supply and Demand
February 6-August 16, 2009
The first museum survey of Shepard Fairey — one of today's best known and most influential street artists — opens this February at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Stickers and posters of the artist's work have appeared on street signs and buildings around the world as part of a guerrilla art campaign of global scale. Featuring over 80 works, Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand traces the artist's career over 20 years, from the iconic Obey Giant stencil to screen prints of political revolutionaries and rock stars to recent mixed-media works and a new mural commissioned for the ICA show. In complement to the exhibition, Fairey will be creating public art works at sites around Boston. On view at the ICA from Feb. 6 to Aug. 16, 2009, Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand is accompanied by a limited-edition version of Supply & Demand, the retrospective publication of the artist's work.
"Shepard Fairey's powerful and varied body of work has reached into all aspects of our visual culture, from political posters to T-shirts and album covers, and now museum installations," says Jill Medvedow, Director of the ICA/Boston. "His integration of design, popular culture, and politics places him in the current of artistic and cultural forces that shape our world today."
"The content of Fairey's work is a call to action about hierarchies and abuses of power, politics and the commodification of culture," says Pedro H. Alonzo, who co-curated the ICA exhibition with Emily Moore Brouillet. "Fairey is committed to creating work that has meaning for his audience — by using familiar cultural iconography that people can relate to and by constantly bringing his work into the public sphere."
Fairey gained international recognition in the early 1990s with his Obey Giant campaign, seen on streets around the world through countless stickers and posters that Fairey produced and disseminated. Since then, he has created works all types of art — on the street, as part of commercial collaborations, and, increasingly, for gallery presentation. He has broken many spoken and unspoken rules of contemporary art and culture. Working as a "fine" artist, commercial artist, graphic designer and businessman, Fairey actively resists categorization. Through the Obey project, he has created a cultural phenomenon and a new model of art making and production. He builds on precedents set by artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, as he disrupts expectations about art and business, and muddies distinctions between fine and commercial art.
Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand features work in a wide variety of media — screen prints, stencils, stickers, rubylith illustrations, collages, and works on wood, metal and canvas. These works reflect the diversity of Fairey's aesthetic, displaying a variety of influences and references such as Soviet propaganda, psychedelic rock posters, images of Americana, and the layering and weathering of street art. While his visually seductive imagery draws in his audience, Fairey uses his work as a platform to make statements on social issues important to him. The artist explains his driving motivation: "The real message behind most of my work is "question everything."
Initiated by former ICA assistant curator Emily Moore Brouillet and developed by guest curator Pedro H. Alonzo, the retrospective examines prevailing themes in Fairey's work: Anti-War / Peace, Leaders of Change, Hierarchies of Power, Music, Excesses of Capitalism, and Activism.
Fairey was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1970 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received a BA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1991. He has had recent solo exhibitions at White Walls Gallery, San Francisco (2008); Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles (2007); Jonathan Levine Gallery, New York (2007); Stolen Space, London (2007); and Galerie Magda Danysz, Paris (2006). His work is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Fairey is also the founder of Studio Number One, a graphic design company.
Shepard Fairey's first museum survey is accompanied by an expanded, limited-edition version of Supply & Demand, the retrospective catalogue of the artist's work published by Gingko Press, in association with Obey Giant. In addition to existing content, the catalogue will include a special supplement with an introductory essay by Emily Moore Brouillet, a conversation between the artist and the curator, and an essay by musician and author Henry Rollins. |
