Shepard Fairey, best known for his four-toned Obama "Hope" poster, has a connection to College Hill that extends beyond matching liberal ideologies and pop-culture nonconformity.
With his first major museum exhibition, "Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand," set to open at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art this Friday, Fairey, a 1992 Rhode Island School of Design graduate and street artist, has once again brandished his invisible hand, coloring the pop-fabric of Providence.
Murals have been popping up across Providence in recent weeks, despite inconsistent degrees of permission. An image in Fairey's style appeared on a building on Westminster Street recently and was later removed, and AS220's Dreyfus Building on Washington Street now sports some of his images on an outer wall. These works have prompted irritation from some property owners, support from Fairey's fellow liberals and, perhaps, inspiration in young, like-minded iconoclasts and rebels.
"Obviously the one on Wesminster he probably didn't (have permission) because someone's already taken it down," said Joel Martinez, an employee of Washington Street restaurant Local 121. "The one at AS220, they were probably like, 'That's cool.' If I had a house and he came and did some artwork on the side, I probably wouldn't take it down,"
Closer to the Brown campus, Fairey arranged a mural in Nice Slice this past week. The image in this space seems to have more significance - and more permission - than some of Fairey's other recent works around Providence.
Nice Slice owner Alfred Read, a RISD graduate, worked with Fairey when both were at RISD and describes himself as an "early supporter" of Fairey's iconoclastic work. As a result, Read is familiar with Fairey's process. He told The Herald that Fairey's images tend to be modular - the artist creates the work in advance and assembles it on location.
Read is also familiar with the thematic threads that run through Fairey's work.
"Traditionally society accepts people like Henry Ford as figures of great importance, significant contributions and role models, but there are other not quite fully realized iconoclasts such as Angela Davis, who have shaped the way a lot of people think and need to be recognized for this," Read wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. "These iconic type figures, such as equal right activists, musicians, artists ... are maybe the people we should be putting on our dollar bills and including more prominently in our culture."
The image inside Nice Slice features a gigantic face of Angela Davis, surrounded by other portraits. Read explained that the collage-like facade of the mural, which features several small pictures, was meant to evoke the posters of a political campaign, where images and ideas are superimposed on one another. Sometimes one image must be ripped away to make room for change.
Read was familiar with Fairey's artistic history as well. "In 1989 he started a social experiment with a sticker," he said. "It showed how people respond to an icon, even if they don't know who it is."
Fairey's Web site, obeygiant.com, features a manifesto written by Fairey in 1990 to describe his reasons for the sticker experiment and his exploration of the human response to images. Fairey wrote that he wants viewers to question their surroundings and their relationships to image. The manifesto is written in extreme and absolute terms. "The paranoid or conservative viewer," warns Fairey on the site, "may be confused by the sticker's persistent presence and condemn it as an underground cult with subversive intentions."
It is ironic, Fairey continues, that people respond to his stickers and his guerilla works of art with horror and disdain, considering the constant bombardment of commercial images that pervade society.
Fairey's anti-establishment art, however, seems to be rapidly becoming a part of the commercial tapestry that he strives to defy. His "Hope" poster was a staple of Barack Obama's Presidential campaign, and, as of Jan. 18, hangs in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
