This past Saturday I visited The Warhol Museum of Pittsburgh to check out the Shepard Fairey SUPPLY AND DEMAND 20 Year Retrospective Show.
From his large scale mural and poster techniques, to a glass-encased pair of sneakers he wore when working in his studio, two floors of the museum gallery space were dedicated to the Fairey show. Often compared to Warhol for his appropriation of pop culture imagery, Fairey creates visually striking works on wood, canvas, and paper (along with stickers, posters, skateboards, buttons, etc.) that create a dynamic relationship between a public space and its audience.
"Arab Woman"
"War by Numbers"
The works mix the silk screening Rubylith technique (a silkscreen stencil cut from a bright red vellum) with weightier stencils, newspaper and pattern collage, spray painting, and hand painting.
As a kid of the 1980s who grew up listening to punk and hardcore music and skateboarding the streets of South Carolina, Fairey’s first mediums for illustration were skateboard decks and t-shirts.
His “Andre the Giant has a Posse” sticker campaign took off while he was an undergrad in illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design. The sticker, featuring a cut-out, black and white image of the deceased WWF Wrestler Andre Rene Roussimoff, aka Andre the Giant (featured in the image above), with the word OBEY in large type below it, is the most recognized work of Fairey’s. Some of the pieces that include the Andre the Giant reference play off of the wrestler’s measurements and height. Although this renders the numbered measurements meaningless, it’s a critique on how value is represented in commodification culture. Obey Giant is even more widespread than the recent controversial Obama Hope image that Fairey created (Fairey was accused of illegally appropriating and reworking a photograph taken by Mannie Garcia of the Associated Press).
"Duality of Humanity"
The simple methods of construction form multiple layers of meaning with an undeniable aesthetic appeal. But Fairey is against art that is merely considered a pretty picture, and a closer look at some of his more political pieces reveal a mesh of materials; stenciled Eastern-style pattern motifs, international newspapers, letters, juxtaposed with human representations of war, violence, and death. Fairey is a prime example of how art has the power to challenge its audience.
Here’s short video of a clean-cut PR-version-of-Fairey explaining the message behind his work at the opening of his Supply and Demand show in Boston:
Stenciled collage murals (courtesy of Fairey and his tagging squad) are covering sporadic urban areas of ‘da burgh for the duration of the retrospective show. Check out a map of the twenty Pittsburgh murals with street view photos here.
Here’s a video of Fairey fully immersed in the printing process, with some tasty background music:
The Supply and Demand show is on view in Pittsburgh until January 31, 2010.
If Fairey’s work doesn’t impress you, the seedy, gruesome, humorously demeaning posters from B-Movies, Grind House, and Classic film are highlighted in the exhibit SuperTrash, on display as well:
A tame tidbit from the SuperTrash exhibition
