Shepard Fairey's new mural project is exhibiting on an abandoned field in a lost Miami universe of boarded up auto parts shops and the occasional, lonely bodega. It's a far fling from the Design District where much of ABMB's satellite fairs are underway, but a principled choice of venue. We talked to him about life after 2008's Obama "HOPE" posters, and the lawsuit AP hit him with when they figured out he transmogrified one of their photographs for the iconic series.
WHITEWALL: Talk about the technique of making a longer piece like this.
Shepard Fairey: All of my work, in terms of technique comes out of the necessities of working quickly and being broke. When I wanted to tackle spots on the street, I used to only be able to pull 18 x 24 prints, and I still use those as kind of the cornerstone of what I do. So these are 18 x 24's, just filed together. The techniques that are on this wall are the same techniques that I would use for an illegal street spot.
WW: But this space gives you a chance to work with something a lot longer, larger, more narrative.
SF: This is an opportunity to do something far more substantial. I get to do a little bit more push/pull similar to what I would do if I was working a fine art piece in my studio. But still, it's a very fast process. It took me about a day and a half to do this working with four assistants.
And for every screen print, I make 450 to sell on my website and then another 400-500 on thinner paper to put out on the street. They're all printed at the same time, so there's this efficiency. It's how I can make affordable work and fund the street work at the same time
WW: It's very corporate. You're churnin' 'em out.
SF: Corporate? I prefer populist. But I think a lot of what I've tried to do is to take into account that most of my audience is poor, and could barely afford a $45 poster. The rest of the audience is even poorer and I want to show the work to them on the street for free. [scratches glue off arm.]
WW: Last year you had this iconic painting--it's in the Smithsonian now--and you earned this huge level of fame in fandom. What do you do next? Is that a limitation or is your celebrity a resource?
You know I was in the public spotlight a lot last year because of the Obama poster and that was good and bad. It took my work to a broader audience and my hope is that people who discovered my work through the Obama posters are looking further back to see this history of grassroots activism that is 20 years deep. Hopefully they get turned on to a world that maybe they weren't familiar with: Street art.
And I hope they appreciate the depth of practice that led to the Obama poster. The Obama poster wasn't just a fluke, like I made an image and it took off. It took off because I had a built in support base. There were already people who liked my work, and took it upon themselves to take that poster and disseminate it like any other poster I was putting out.
So that's great, but the other side of it is this sort of rebellious fan base that I have. I consider myself very rebellious. I'm still doing illegal street art, but people say "oh he's working with mainstream politics, that's a sellout move." Or people say Obama didn't work miracles in the first year aren't you disappointed? You pushed for him." But I say, I still think it would have been much worse to have McCain as president.
WW: Some of the old fans were disappointed in you, then.
SF: I think there's a tendency in human psychology--whatever they call it, schadenfreude--where whenever something gets really big there's just an unavoidable backlash. It has kind of hurt my feelings that a lot of people take cheap shots and say "oh he's just in Obama's pockets. He's a cheerleader for Obama." Some people actually said I was on Obama's payroll.
The upside though are the fun, philanthropic opportunities. I've been doing stuff for Feeding America, Refugees in Darfur, move on.org, and those are all really cool projects that came my way.
WW: Your art and activism feeds directly into each other.
SF: I love making provocative visuals but I also care about a lot of different things.
WW: Has criticism made you more explicit about what your work is and isn't?
SF: It's frustrating for me that when I've incorporated historical elements from graphic design in older posters from 10 years ago, now people say his work is totally unoriginal -- when 10 years ago I was just a street artist at the poverty level, and I would never be taken seriously.
I use to -- when I saw something in a magazine that I wanted to draw -- I would just redraw it. Now I'm very careful about all that stuff because the AP case with the copyright infringement is very stressful.
WW: The AP case seems to have become this trial of ideas over what's appropriating and what's not appropriating. It almost recalls the ban on sampling that hit rap in the early 90s. What would you hope would be the outcome of your trial not just for you, but for other graphic artists?
SF: OK, well if you listen to hip-hop today we know that the art of hip-hop suffered greatly from samples having to be cleared, and cleared at exorbitant prices. What I do, some of it is very analogous to that. The idea that somebody would not buy a James Brown record or a Parliament [Funkadelic] record because it was sampled in hip-hop was ridiculous.
However, what I do is similar to a degree, but I'm also illustrating everything so there's a transformative aspect. And in the case of the Obama image, I think there are some very important free speech components. Political speech needs to be protected. That's why politicians don't have rights celebrity rights of reproduction. That law is there for somebody who makes their living from their likeness, like a rock star or a movie star. You can't just put a picture of them on a piece of art or on a piece of merchandise because theoretically that could harm their ability to make a living from their likeness.
Politicians don't have that same protection. So especially in the case of making an illustration of a Barack Obama, I use nothing from that photograph that was copyrightable. All I wanted to convey was the likeness of Barack Obama shed in a new light, which is he looks dignified, and has leadership qualities, and some vision. The photographer didn't add any creative content to that photograph that should even be copyrightable. He didn't pose Obama, he didn't light Obama, he didn't dress Obama, or put up a backdrop behind Obama. He just clicked photo after photo after photo.
But the problem of copyright law is that anything that you use as the basis of an illustration is going to be copyright infringement under the law -- whether you pause a video and you work from a still, or from a photograph, anything that's entered the media other than sitting down with Obama firsthand and drawing him, or taking my own photograph. That's really problematic when it comes to political speech.
So I do respect photographers and I collaborate with them and compensate photographers on a regular basis, but this is a situation where, when you look at so much of the grassroots art that was made against Bush or for Obama, if people were scared they could be sued for making those images it would really decrease the volume and the quality of the dialogue that's out there. That's where intellectual property and the free right of political expression need to come to some sort of compromise.
WW: So looking forward what are some of the issues you would like to do a bring into your art over the next year?
SF: It's going to be a lot of the same stuff. Human rights, the environment, and global warming are really important to me. I'm very worried about that. I have a body of work I'm doing for the spring in the Jeffrey Dietch gallery. It's about trailblazers. People who may have been controversial early in their careers and have since been recognized by pop-culture whether it's Mohammed Ali, or MLK, or the Black Panthers, or Debbie Harry, or Grandmaster Flash.
