Shepard Fairey designed his first sticker campaign, “André the Giant has a Posse,” while he was still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. The sticker featured the late professional French wrestler alongside his legendary height and weight—7 feet, four inches and 520 pounds. After Fairey and his skateboarding community plastered André’s face across Providence, Rhode Island, the motif took on a life of its own and began appearing in cities nationwide. Responding to this growing popularity, Fairey produced a stripped-down version of the design, which he titled Obey Giant, that soon became the artist’s logo. Obey Giant has made cameo appearances in movies and shows including Batman Forever (1999), Phone Booth (2002), and Family Guy, and the campaign was the subject of a 1996 documentary by Helen Stickler. Fairey has since modeled a number of his most iconic works after Obey Giant’s simple aesthetic, including Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign poster, “Hope.”

I have been looking back through art and photos from my 30 year history as I work on the art for my “Facing the Giant: Three Decades of Dissent” show and I was inspired to make a painting and print inspired by a photo I took of a “Hello My Name Is” paste-up I did in SOHO NYC back in early 1996. At that time I was still living in Providence R.I. running my screen printing studio, barely scraping by financially. I was desperately trying to survive but also kept putting my imagery up in the streets. I had recently fallen in love with Russian Constructivist design, which along with Barbara Kruger’s art, and much of American advertising, used primarily red, black, and white, so I began designing in those colors to keep my art cost-effective and visually cohesive. I was screen printing posters in red and black ink on white paper, but I was ecstatic when a friend and ‘zine maker Ben Woodward taught me how to rig the copiers at Kinko’s (now known as FedEx Office) with a paperclip to yield free copies. The Kinko’s near my apartment in Providence had copiers with a red toner cartridge AND a black toner cartridge… meaning that I could make 11×17 inch red and black mini-posters free if I was stealth about it. The “Hello My Name Is” paste-up in this print is one of those 11×17 copies and was inspired by the pervasive use of “Hello My Name Is” stickers with tags on them by graffiti writers. I loved all the graffiti and stickers in NYC, so this paste-up was a tribute to that world and one of my last images using the O.G. Giant face as I was transitioning to the Icon Face and Star as my main iconography. I threw a couple of other early images of mine in for extra texture and flavor. – Shepard