Artist Shepard Fairey has long been haunting consumer culture with an
ambitious mocking street campaign featuring an omnipresent Andre the
Giant. An astute student in the arts of persuasion, Fairey began his epic
satire on the science of celebrity endorsements and the alchemy of
suggesting desire back in 1989, while he was still a student at The Rhode
Island School of Design. Since then his propaganda has been proliferated
through stickers, clothing, skateboards, posters, stencil based graffiti and
even a documentary film, to spread over the United States and the
unsuspecting world at large.
Currently based in Los Angeles, where his design firm Studio Number One
is landing high-level corporate accounts from companies eager to see how
his commercial parodies can help sell their products, Fairey’s rising success
has helped transform his once homemade Xerox style into lush multi-colored
screen prints. There’s no telling what these images are selling, but
whatever it is, it’s all so seductive that it’s hard to resist.

-Excerpt by
Carlo McCormick
(Senior Editor of Paper Magazine and frequent Contributor to Art Forum and Juxtapoz)