The poster isn’t dead … long live the poster!
Guerrilla artist/graphic designer Shepard Fairey is world famous (um, notorious) for papering the alleys, underpasses and abandoned storefronts of the world with starkly powerful images limned in black, white and red. I still remember the first “André the Giant Has a Posse” sticker I ever saw, somewhere in the San Francisco Mission District in 1989 — and the invisible question mark that immediately popped out of my head.
Shepard is one of contradictory characters who makes graffiti art because he has to, because it’s turned into a nice living, but also to change the world. He fell in love with Obama at first word, and contacted the campaign: Could he please give the candidate the André the Giant treatment?
(Shepard: “He didn’t want the Farakhan endorsement, maybe he didn’t want the Shepard Fairey endorsement either …”)
Silence from Obama … then a quiet yes.
Fairey papered Philly, then put a short run of the posters up on his website for sale: $40 apiece, using the profits to buy (somewhat ironically) legal street advertising space. A copy autographed by Obama is now hanging on Fairey’s wall, they’re now selling on eBay for $1500 and up, and the story has hit the national media like the proverbial hurricane.
Any graphic designer making the front pages gets a smile from me.
Attaboy, Shepard.
