Shepard Fairey, Citizen Artist.

• Author: D'Ambrosio, Antonino
• Position: Essay

For those of us growing up under the shadow of the Reagan Presidency, the 1980s were a bleak time. In an effort to grab hold of something positive, some of us were set free in the graffiti and skateboarding community. Armed with a skateboard, a spray paint can, and a pair of Dickies work pants bursting with cassettes from the Clash, Black Flag, Public Enemy, and Minor Threat, we rolled around the neighborhood scrawling public art on the scores of abandoned buildings that once bustled with workers but were left to rot. It was our attempt to reclaim what was lost by creating something new. During one late night ride we spotted a set of posters with the stenciled image of wrestler Andre the Giant and one lone word printed boldly below the face: "Obey." It got our attention.

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Soon, it was impossible not to see

"Obey Giant" plastered all over Washington, D.C., Boston, or Baltimore, and appearing next to the famous tags "Cost" and "Revs" in New York. The image declared, "Andre the Giant has a posse," and behind the posse was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design.

A skateboarder and punk music fan, Shepard Fairey, born in Charleston, South Carolina, activated a new movement with defiant echoes of the French Letterists, the fury of '70s punk, and the confrontational style of 1980s artists Winston Smith, Barbara Kruger, Raymond Pettibon, and Robbie Conal.

"My early work was angry," Fairey says. "It was absurdist propaganda coming from more of a Dada or nihilistic approach. Since then, I've tried to channel my frustration and anger in a positive way but still remain critical, analytical, and willing to embrace what we have in common as people rather than just taking a stand for how I'm different from all that I hate."

Two decades later, the thirty-nine-year-old street artist made the world stop, think, and act with the now iconic Obama "Hope" poster. Carried out with no assistance from the Obama campaign, the spread of the "Hope" poster was a grassroots effort.

"By the end of the first week 10,000 posters were dispersed and it was all over the Internet," he says. "All it took was an image that could be passed along, helping demonstrate just how profoundly Obama was affecting people because now there was a symbol they could share."

How Fairey moved from "Obey" to "Hope" reflects the urgency he embraces as a citizen-artist.

T here is a distinct worldview linking those of us raised in the '80s who...