The Buzz Guru
Straddling the worlds of street art and commerce, marketing specialist Shepard Fairey knows how to get alternative culture kids talking about mainstream brands.
Chris McPherson
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST: Fairey, here signing prints, managed to make it in the fine-arts world by first circumventing it.
Chris McPherson
STREET CRED: Despite his high-profile clients, Shepard Fairey still gets arrested for posting the street art that first got him noticed.
Chris McPherson
OBEY GURU: From the Los Angeles office of his marketing design firm, Fairey helped Dr. Pepper/Seven Up with the relaunch of its Sunkist brand–including redesigning a logo with a "graffiti look."
When Shepard Fairey arrived in New York City this past September, it was at an interesting moment in a curious career. In some circles, the 34-year-old Fairey is known as one of the most prolific and notorious street artists of his generation, creating memorable graphics that have spread through urban centers all over the world. He was in New York to join a panel at a conference called Creativity Now, where he would speak on the subject of "The Commodification of Street Art."
At the time, Fairey had just split with a longtime creative partner and founded his own marketing design firm, Studio Number One. After the conference he and his wife, Amanda, would visit Japan, where a couple of shops sell clothing that features his imagery. Then he would return to Los Angeles, where he is based, to finish preparing for his latest gallery exhibition, titled "This Is Your God," which juxtaposed his signature graphics with dollar bills. He would also get started on Studio Number One's first projects for some very large corporate clients who hope Fairey can help them connect with a much-sought-after demographic.
All of this should be enough to make it clear that Fairey walks a fine line between art and commerce, between the underground world of graffiti culture and the very mainstream world of selling products to consumers. "Sometimes," he said at the panel discussion, "I feel like a double agent." But even at the conference in New York, where it would have been easy to pander to a largely alternative culture crowd by denouncing corporations, he described himself as a capitalism-embracing entrepreneur.
Yet that is not quite the whole story. Later that night, Fairey went out with a few friends to put up some of his street images--"bombing," as the process is called. Spotting an irresistible blank billboard in Manhattan's Chinatown, he managed to get to the roof of a building with a six- by eight-foot folded-up poster, a small bucket of wheat paste, and a roller. He got the image up, but then things went awry: Someone called the police, and Fairey was arrested, charged with criminal mischief and trespassing. He spent the next 48 hours in jail. It was his ninth bust.
"Sometimes I feel like a double agent," says Fairey.
The rap sheet has not kept Fairey from landing mainstream clients. Imagery he created with his earlier firm, known as BLK/MRKT, has supported the marketing efforts of such household brands as Levi's, Mountain Dew, and Universal Pictures. The new Studio Number One assignments awaiting him as he posted his $1,000 bail included label designs for Express jeans and the graphics for an upcoming repositioning campaign for Sunkist, the orange soda made by Dr Pepper/Seven Up.
Can you call someone a maverick if he works for multinational corporations? Can you call him a sellout if he's willing to risk arrest for the sake of self-expression? Can you call him a self-promoter if his most famous images are unsigned? Just as the "meaning" of Fairey's street visuals depends on who's looking, the answers to those questions vary according to who's asking. But wherever you come down, the underlying issue is one that resonates: Many entrepreneurs wrestle with the problem of integrity--the tension between what you want to do and what the market is willing to pay you to do. As hard as it is to craft a vision, it can be even harder to stick to it, to avoid letting pragmatism descend into compromise, to keep alive the idealism that inspired you in the first place.
Several weeks after Fairey's eventful trip to New York, the offices of Studio Number One seem relatively calm, even mellow. (The criminal charges were still unresolved, pending an April hearing.) Situated in the blue-green Wiltern Building in L.A.'s Koreatown, Studio Number One has seven full-time employees plus a handful of part-timers and interns. The front section of the office has been made over into an art gallery--known as Subliminal Projects--and there are stacks of posters with the image that Fairey made into his street-art signature: a vaguely menacing visage, often paired with the word Obey or Giant, which he refers to as "the icon face." Fairey's office, in the back, is stuffed with art books, decorated with album covers, and co-occupied by George, a year-old pug. There isn't much obvious structure at the firm; Fairey simply strolls out and hangs around his designers' cubicles, looking over their shoulders. There is usually music playing, often hip-hop or punk. This week, Fairey was making new designs for the Obey Giant clothing line and overseeing the first issue of a magazine called Swindle, his latest project.
Although Studio Number One was only a couple of months old at this point, the same space had housed BLK/MRKT, which was formed back in 1996 when Fairey joined with artist and designer Dave Kinsey. Differences both creative and personal led to a split, with Kinsey keeping the old firm's name and Fairey taking the offices and most of the personnel.
One thing that's not immediately obvious is why Fairey would use his skills on behalf of a corporation. A low-key but affable guy, with short hair and a solid build, Fairey favors T-shirts (Sex Pistols, Ramones), jeans, and sneakers. Earlier in his street-art career, he routinely pasted the Obey icon face over advertisements. In one of his final such acts, he added the head to a series of Sprite "Obey your thirst" billboards (later he was actually hired by Sprite, and while he wondered if his client knew about that stunt, he didn't ask). He admits he'd like to be more selective--pretty much the only thing he rules out is work for tobacco companies--and that there are times when clients can be painfully predictable. He slips into mimicry: "We want to push the envelope, but we don't want to tear the envelope. We want to be outside the box--but the box needs to be nearby." Pause, smile, big laugh.
