Shepard Fairey (American, b. 1970) is a street artist who emerged from the skateboarding scene in the late 1980s while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1989 he designed the Andre the Giant Has a Posse sticker campaign, which legal threats forced him to redesign into the OBEY Giant image that became the basis of his OBEY Clothing line in 2001.,
In 2008 his Hope poster of Barack Obama brought him wide recognition during the U.S. presidential election.Fairey has worked for 14 years with the advocacy organization Amplifier, founded by the photographer Aaron Huey, who first approached him to start the collaboration.Ahead of the 2025 No Kings protests he distributed free screen-printed posters, Domestic Terrorist and Paid Agitator, depicting masked ICE agents, saying the prints were meant as “a mirror to those committing the dehumanizing attacks”.
Fairey entered the NFT market in March 2021, when an auction of Obey Ideal Power Mural sold for 90 ETH. That September he released the OG Obey collection, including OG Obey V.1, a digital reworking of his Andre the Giant sticker. In 2022 he launched DEGENERATE/REGENERATE, drawing on 32 years of his own archive to generate 7,400 unique NFTs, each priced at 0.1 ETH.
In 2018 he collaborated with the Swiss watchmaker Hublot to co-design the Big Bang Meca-10 Shepard Fairey, a limited-edition watch based on the blueprint of a construction site.He has also painted collaborative murals with the street artist Vhils, who has said he balances Fairey's graphic, layered style against his own carving and erosion techniques on their shared works.
