Guru

We've been friends for 15 years, Shepard Fairey reminds me, his memory of 1994 as clear to him as it is foggy to me. Perhaps because it was a significant year in his life, in many ways as important as 2008, when Barack Obama's election catapulted him out of the shadows of street art into guest appearances on The Colbert Report and Charlie Rose. His life was very different back then: a recent RISD grad who set up a print shop in Providence to support himself as a street artist, he was then known for his omnipresent "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" stickers and T-shirts. "All I really cared about was skateboarding and punk rock and hip-hop," he says. "All of that was very removed from Providence. Skateboard culture was on the West Coast, and I was interested in graffiti and street art, which was in New York. At that point I was very much someone who was hungry to be more in the thick of things but I didn't really know how to make that happen."

All that changed one summer when Carlo McCormick put a piece of Fairey's in a Paper-sponsored show he curated at Alleged Gallery. "So I dropped everything that I was doing, and my crew and I got into my station wagon and we drove from Providence to New York and I met you, I met Futura, I met Aaron Rose, Phil Frost, Thomas Campbell, Mike Mills that night. And that changed my life."

Today, Shepard "Obama 'Hope' poster" Fairey is one of the most famous artists in America, called upon by Time and Rolling Stone for covers and ensconced in the Smithsonian museum at the National Portrait Gallery. Because of his arrest in Boston on the opening night of his retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art and his lawsuit with the Associated Press, his profile in the courts of law and public opinion has risen dramatically. Business is booming as well at his design agency Studio Number One, where his commercial work for movies and major corporations keeps some 15 people busy. Next on his list is to enhance his art world reputation as his show travels to The Warhol Museum in October, followed by an exhibition of new work at the prestigious Deitch Projects in April.

David Hershkovits: It seems like when Barack Obama won, you won as well. Do you think your art helped elect Obama?

Shepard Fairey: A lot of people ask me that question, and it's really tough because if I say "yes," it sounds like I'm claiming some sort of responsibility, which I'm not. I think it made a difference because it provided a very valuable tool for people to say, "I support Obama." He had his logo, which was a great logo, and he had his slogans, but that portrait, that makes the human connection no one had created.

DH: Art with a message isn't usually popular with critics. Have you found that to be the case with your work as well?

SF: Yes, absolutely. Peter Schjeldahl from the New Yorker and Christopher Knight from the L.A. Times both were sort of dismissive about my work as having a limited pictorial vocabulary. I don't think they used the word "trite," but the inference is that political statements are trite. A lot of people buy into the romantic notion of the enigmatic artist whose work is brilliant only if you can't understand it. But my goal with art was always to be a communicator. I've always been a populist whose work was not for the elite gatekeepers, but more for people who may not even give a shit about gallery or museum art and are affected by video games, graphics, T-shirts, album packaging and advertising.

DH: Now that you've become a public figure, you're a lightning rod for everyone from the Boston police to the commenters on the Huffington Post. How do you react to that?

SF: The Obama thing put me into a whole different level of media exposure. But it's kind of thankless in a lot of ways, because you get abused like crazy, most of it anonymously. To me, it's more important to put yourself out there and say what you believe. Whether it's about the health care reform debate or pushing through a stronger climate bill, these are all things that I know, if I'm outspoken about, I'm gonna get a lot of shit for. But if what I say gives one person the courage to speak their mind, I'll withstand the abuse. You know, I'm pretty thin-skinned, so sometimes I'll try to go to bed and I can't sleep because people are so fucking mean.

DH: I don't think you ever consciously decided you wanted to be a spokesperson for Obama. You're an artist and you do your own thing.

SF: The interesting thing is that I had to sacrifice a lot of the freedom I had when I was more anonymous. At the same time, I'm still doing street art despite the arrest in Boston -- I'm just figuring out different ways to do it. And part of what's been frustrating isn't that I've been getting attacked by right-wingers -- I expect that kind of idiot stuff. It's when my own peers are like, "Oh, Shepard Fairey doesn't keep it real anymore, he's not street enough, he supports a mainstream candidate, what a sell-out." Or, "He did something for a company like Saks Fifth Avenue." I think it's really shitty that these people don't want you to be multi-dimensional. I still do street art and go to art shows and I DJ and do all these counterculture things, but I'll also go on Rachel Maddow or be interviewed by potentially hostile media and talk about my ideas. Yes, I'm a very motivated self-promoter, but it's not all about the limelight.

DH: You mentioned that Saks Fifth Avenue bag, and I wanted to talk a little more about Studio Number One. I was wondering how do you instill your values into your company's culture?

SF: When I first sold my screen-printing business in Providence in 1996 at a loss and chose to move to San Diego, it was because I thought it was important for me to cultivate my skills as an artist and a designer, not pull a squeegee all day. At first I was forced to take virtually any work that came my way just to survive. I was using my money from my design work to fund my street work because the street work lost money. But as my design business started to do a little better, I could be choosier about my work. I actually turned down a lot of work from jobs that either weren't in an area of interest to me culturally, just seemed boring, or they seemed to pose an ethical issue.

We've turned down work from Hummer and cigarette companies and aluminum skateboards that seemed really chintzy. When we're working with a client, we really try to emphasize that people respond to authenticity. If somebody says they want to sponsor this music event or want to be involved in this action sports thing, we try to educate them on how they can be a symbiotic component rather than just being sort of exploitative, which tends to be why people have negative reactions to corporate intervention.

DH: Tell me more about the shopping bags you recently designed for Saks.

SF: I thought it was hilarious. Advertising is propaganda, and Saks is very conspicuous consumption. I thought people would appreciate boldly pulling back the curtain on the whole propaganda aspect of advertising rather than being seductive in a more sub-conscious, mysterious way, like a lot of advertising works. I thought people would appreciate that, but there was an incredible backlash to that campaign.

DH: You're a magnet for this kind of stuff.

SF: The people from Saks were awesome, they were really great. My thing is that art and commerce need each other. If you accept capitalism, which I do, advertising is going to be created, and it can either look good or it can not look good. For me, if it's raising the bar creatively for advertising that's going to be happening anyway, as long as I don't have an ethical conflict with the product, I think everybody wins.

DH: Turning to your personal work, I understand you've joined the stable at Deitch Projects.

SF: This April I'm going to be showing with Jeffrey [Deitch], and I'm really excited about it because a lot of the people who I admire, who I consider peers, show with him: Twist, Swoon, Espo, Clare Rojas, Ryan McGinness. And he has a history with Basquiat, Haring and Warhol. I think he's the perfect bridge between the more urban street culture -- which I'm seen as part of -- and the more established, more fine art world. He puts pieces in good collections.

DH: Was it hard for you to leave the Jonathan LeVine Gallery that's been representing you in New York?

SF: I've worked with Jonathan several times. We did a really big show in New York in 2007. He always said, "I don't make my artists have contracts because, if something that's going to advance their careers comes along, I don't want to hold them back." A lot of people he shows do really great work, but for many of them the pinnacle is a nice article in Juxtapoz [magazine]. And though I totally respect what Juxtapoz has done for the art scene I've been a part of, I have slightly different ambitions.

DH: How did becoming a father shape your thinking about the present and the future?

SF: In a way, I don't think I would have made the Barack Obama poster. [My daughter] Vivienne was just over two at the time, and [my wife] Amanda was pregnant with Madeline. If I didn't have the future of my children on my mind, I don't know if I would have deviated from my brand and my audience's expectations the way I did when I made that poster. I was thinking, "Will my daughters begin their lives in a Republican administration or will this guy who I think is very extraordinary be the president?" That held a lot of weight. I could do things that are cathartic for me and bash things I don't like, but in the long term is that going to make a better world for my kids? And also seeing Amanda, how she changed once we had kids, and this very nurturing maternal side of her that came out into the forefront, that was very revealing and gave me a whole different appreciation of what women do for the world. That affected my work.

DH: You also have a book coming out in October, Art for Obama, featuring artworks inspired by Obama, from a show you helped organize.

SF: When I made my Obama poster there weren't a lot of people making art about Obama. The really exciting thing is that a lot of people started coming forward and producing work. This artistic grassroots activism that happened was mind-blowing. Yosi Sergant was helping to catalyze a lot of it, so we organized the "Manifest Hope" show in Denver during the convention, and we revisited that with more artists and more work in D.C. during the inauguration. We decided this was an important movement and that art had been shown to be a very powerful aspect in the campaign and that grassroots activism needs to be acknowledged.