Unlike Banksy, Shepard Fairey does not hide his identity. Obey’s nickname comes from the 1988 film They Live, directed by John Carpenter. A major figure in the contemporary street art movement, Fairey rose to prominence in the early 1990s with his “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” campaign, in which he designed posters, stickers, and murals featuring the eponymous wrestler around his Providence Rhode Island. The iconic 2008 Barack Obama campaign poster ‘Hope’ encapsulates a number of the artist’s recurring interests, including propaganda, portraiture, and political power. Fairey’s works, which sell for six figures at auction, are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The artist was born in 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina in USA. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1992 and has been honored with many international awards. He is undoubtedly one of the most important urban artists in the world and always wanted to give a political dimension to his work, as he typically states: “I call my art propaganda because I believe that any art that defends specific goals contains elements of propaganda. There is a difference between propaganda in the cynical sense of the word, which wants to have the last word in a conversation, and art which aims to open the conversation.
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