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Transcription: [00:03:26]
{SPEAKER name="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"?

[00:04:01]
{SPEAKER name="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.

[00:04:14]
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.

[00:04:58]
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.

[00:05:47]
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.

[00:06:07]
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.

[00:07:17]
Um, and I made a third piece which is the piece that's here, at the Smithsonian.

[00:07:23]
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]]

[00:08:04]
{SPEAKER name="Wendy Wick Reaves"}
And so what was shown during the Democratic Convention?

[00:08:08]
{SPEAKER name="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.

[00:09:00]
{SPEAKER name="Wendy Wick Reaves"}
Can you say just a little bit more about your relationship with the campaign?

Transcription Notes:
Corrected Interviewer Name = Wendy Wick Reaves (found online) Rubilyth = brand of masking film used in print industry