Shepard Fairey
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Shepherd Fairy’s Obey Giant started out humbly with a few rough-cut stencils of the wrestler-and-sometime actor, Andre the Giant. Proof for his friends that the medium really is the message. Since those early student days stickering in Providence when he attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Shepherd’s work has matured and evolved to form a discourse on capitalism and provided a pop art investigation into the semiotics of consumption. The case history of Obey Giant now spans some 15 years and 13 arrests, with Shepherd Fairy reworking classic Black Panther images of Angela Davis and Maoist revolutionary propaganda, through to recently commissioned poster and album art for Led Zeppelin’s comeback tour. In fact, Obey Giant now features whole teams of wheatpaste artists hitting the streets with Shepherd’s unmistakable artwork, and the whole project shows no signs of running out of steam.