Shepard Fairey | Civil Dis-OBEY-dience at Schema : more than ethnic

Shepard Fairey | Civil Dis-OBEY-dience

OBEY Sticker collection on newspaper box. Photocredit: Leah Yin

In 1989 while I was watching the Tiananmen protest on a small black and white tube in China, 19 years old Frank Shepard Fairey was creating a black and white sticker of a giant named Andre.

If you're familiar with street art, then Shepard Fairey is a name all too familiar--the contemporary artist famous for his graphic OBEY Giant street viral campaigns, and as of late, infamous in a copyright scandal related to his iconic "Hope" portrait of Obama. Online and public opinion surrounding Shepard seem to pop up as aggressively and virally as his repetitious stickers on the streets.

Fairey's first museum retrospective is currently showing at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA) entitled, Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand. With an ipod as your personal curatorial guide, visitors can survey and engage the thematic groupings of his work and chew on the socio-political concerns Shepard propagates. Prophetic of his time, Shepard's iconic portraits of "Arab Woman" predicted the wave of media buzz around the Neda Agha-Soltan story, which turned a young beautiful Arab into an icon of Iran's civil unrest.

If you can't make it to ICA Boston before August 16th (closing date), you're still in luck. You can download the audio guide and brochure and check out the collection online. It is also more than likely that your city walls, buses and poles may already hold a collection of Fairey's work. OBEY and look for it.

More: Institute of Contemporary Art Boston | ICA Exhibit Brochure | The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute | Photocredit: Leah Yin