Artist Interview: Shepard Fairey

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Wendy Wick Reaves: This is Wendy Wick Reaves, curator of prints and drawings.

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And I'm pleased to have a few minutes to ask Shepard Fairey some questions about his original artwork of Barack Obama that we've just acquired for the National Portrait Gallery.

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Shepard, some of our visitors are gonna be surprised, I think, that your original HOPE-image of Obama is actually a very large, complex and beautiful collage.

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And underneath that stenciled, iconic face that we all recognize are newspaper clippings and pattern papers--

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Could you tell us a little bit about those clippings?

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Some of those newspapers look really old. And those pattern papers, a lot of which seem to have the 'OBEY' insignia kind of embedded in them?

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And also-- Since all that detail isn't gonna show up in reproduction, why did you bother making such a complex and really, that beautiful elegant surface?

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Shepard Fairey: Thanks. Well, with my art, I'm striving to create images that are iconic, but I also feel that everything that you produce as an artist is the result of a very, you know, complicated set of diverse experiences that all inform the eventual result and I'm inspired by lots of different kinds of art,

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and, uh, a lot of people know that I'm a street artist and one of the things I really enjoyed about the street, putting work up on the street, was the textures that come with the surfaces on the street.

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Um, you put a poster up, it takes on the texture of the bricks in the background. Eventually, someone else puts a poster over it, that gets ripped, there are layers, there's chipped paint,

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and there's a very organic tactile quality to all the surfaces that I find very appealing.

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I also love free association.

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I love pop art.

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I love Warhol's work, but I love Rauschenberg.

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I love that Rauschenberg would juxtapose things that would just conjure every viewer to come up with different interpretations.

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And, you know, I think there are those elements in my pieces;

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I create collages that are a combination of old wallpapers that I found, that I like,

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patterns that I've printed myself that I've woven my own imagery into but that it's, it's much more subtle.

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And old newspaper clippings-- I buy these old bound volumes of newspapers from, a lot of times they're from the turn of the century to the 40s because all the great engraving illustrations were in the newspapers then, and I use

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some text that's relevant to the image and some that has nothing to do with the image.

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But, um, a lot of what I've tried to communicate through my work, through the years, is, um,

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that everything has multiple agendas and to be, um, the viewer needs to look at both the, you know, immediate read and the subtext.

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So, that's something that I'm putting across, both literally and metaphorically in the piece.

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Wendy Wick Reaves: Um, there's considerable confusion in the press about the various versions of your image of Obama - and I know you've talked about how you actually love that concept of having sort of a, a single, basic concept that spawns many slightly variant versions. But since we're gonna be talking about this object for generations to come - we kind of wanna be accurate - so, can you give us, sort of, the chronological story of how you started with, I guess, the "progress" image, and then moved to the "hope"-captioned image, and then the Democratic Convention, and, did you ever do one with the word "change"?

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Shepard Fairey: I did do a version with the word "change", but it wasn't of this exact portrait. I'll give you the most concise version I can of this [[laughter]] of this journey.

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I began with, um, an illustration of Obama. I cut my initial illustrations out of Rubilyth which is a screen printing film and I always have worked as a screen printer so when I'm making images I think about them in term of flat color. So I did a three-layer Rubilyth illustration, or actually four-layer, um -- one for the dark blue, one for the red, and two shades in the light blue -- and then I scan those into the computer and composite them and make whatever tweaks I want to make and that's how I come up with the composition of the poster. So it's a hand-done illustration, then with, um, composing digitally.

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And I initially used the word "progress" with the, uh, image that most people know as the "hope" image, um, and made some prints and put them up in Los Angeles and, um, made a free download for the web and, um, got some feedback from the Obama campaign about a week later saying we love the image but we like the word "hope" and, um my, my suspicion is that 'progress' is a slippery slope towards socialism and in their mind if they're being, trying to play it very safe -- and I can understand that -- and so, um, I was, uh, at first I thought you know "hope" was maybe too much about thought and not enough about action but then I realized that without optimism people won't act.

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So "hope" is the first step and I felt that it was significant and I was glad to change it to "hope" and I think that it, um, you know, tied in with Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, and that was the image that I, uh, then made -- most of the 300,000 posters that were made were of the "hope" image.

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Um, I actually made the fine art pieces after making the original that was going to be screen-printed, um, and offset-printed, um, because initially I was just trying to get the piece out as quickly as possible because the primaries were happening and every day wasted was, you know, another day that that, uh, would mean Hillary was probably on top so, um, I um, you know after the image seemed to be getting a lot of, a lot of traction, I was asked by the, uh, entrepreneur Russell Simmons -- who founded Def Jam Records and he does RUSH Arts for inner city schools in New York City -- uh, if I would make a fine art piece for him and, um, he was willing to pay a lot of money for it and I used that money to make more posters and, um, I also donated a second piece of that image to his RUSH Arts Foundation which all the money went to his charity.

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Um, and I made a third piece which is the piece that's here, at the Smithsonian.

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So, it's not an edition, it's the same stencil used three times but the collage and various, um, subtle stencil elements in all three pieces are different so if you, if you put them side by side and squinted they would look similar but if you really looked at all of the mixed media elements they're, um, they're all different from each other. So I saved a third one because I wanted to have a third one to show at events around, you know, around Obama, um, leading up to -- or post-election if things went well -- and it couldn't have worked out any better, I'm so happy that it's here. [[laughter]]

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Wendy Wick Reaves: And so what was shown during the Democratic Convention?

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Shepard Fairey: During the Democratic Convention I created a ten by fourteen-foot, um, backdrop for the stage at our event, in our 'Manifest Hope' event in Denver and that piece is basically a um, a slightly more refined street mural of of Obama and it's not made with stencils, it's, um, it's hand-painted, um, Xeroxes all tiled up, um, along with some smaller eighteen by twenty-four screen prints that I make and I, I always um, created my screen prints to be modular so that I could tile them up in a grid on the street and then put larger images over and the two could work together and that's basically how I created that large canvas for Denver.

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Wendy Wick Reaves: Can you say just a little bit more about your relationship with the campaign?

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Shepard Fairey: Sure.

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My relationship with the campaign really didn't start until after I had made the Obama image.

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Um, I initially wanted to make an Obama image but I didn't want to do so without at least, um, permission from the campaign, though I didn't have a relationship with anyone from the campaign, so

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my friend Josie who knew someone inside the campaign said, "Shepard Fairey would like to make a poster supporting Barack Obama-- are you guys okay with that?". And that was actually in October of 2007.

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And not until the second week of January 2008 did, um, was permission granted and I did the illustration that very night and had the poster in production the following day.

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But I didn't want to be-- I have a somewhat sordid past as a street artist, having been arrested, being, in my opinion, expressing my free speech and being a patriot because I'm sharing my ideas about how the country can be improved, through my art.

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But, um, you know, technically some of it's illegal. And I didn't want to be a liability to the Obama campaign.

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But once I made the image, and it caught on, the Obama campaign said, "We can't use the image you've created because we know that we can't control how you're disseminating it and it's not a photograph we have the rights to, but would you make another image for us?"

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And so, ultimately I did two images for them that I donated, that were, uh, one said "Change" beneath it and the other said "Vote".

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Wendy Wick Reaves: With this acquisition we see free street art, if you will, converging with viable commercial art and fine art object donated to a national museum.

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And you've said you see all of those components as one piece, one process. Could you tell us how you would like to see this piece interpreted at the National Portrait Gallery?

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And, to take it just one step further, what does this say about the broader world of art and design and those disparate elements, all of which you've participated in?

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Shepard Fairey: Well, I have been drawing since I was a little kid, but I never really thought about the dynamics of the fine art world vs. the commercial art world vs. the illustration world until I got a little bit older, went to art school, and, um, I'm very stubborn.

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And I thought, "Well, I want to do all of it." [[laughs]] And really, I think that for most people becoming a painter, a fine artist, is very unrealistic. There's a very very small percentage of people who can pull that off as a career.

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So my thought was, I want to make posters, t-shirts, do album packaging for people, make skateboard graphics, and do my own street art and bypass getting a gallery to grant me permission to put my work on their walls and take my work straight to the people.

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But, you know, also be able to express myself the way I want as a 'fine artist'. So, there are a lot of different things that I care about that are, you know, converging in the way that I work.

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I'm a populist; I'm trying to reach as many people as possible.

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I love the concept in fine art of making a masterpiece, something that will endure. But I also understand how short the attention span of most consumers is and that you really need to work with the metabolism of consumer culture, a lot of times, to make something relevant within the zeitgeist.

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So, what I hope people take away from my image, if they care to look at my history, is that an artist can be multi-dimensional, they can fuse a lot of different things they care about into what they do everyday and, you know, it's not necessary to paint yourself into a corner with categories.

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Wendy Wick Reaves: Well I think you have created a masterpiece in this work, and we're really thrilled to have it at the Portrait Gallery. Thank you.

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Shepard Fairey: Thank you so much. I'm really honored to be in the Portrait Gallery.