This project is modeled after the Hurricane Poster Project, an effort started for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Hugely successful, the project raised thousands of dollars since its inception. Its founder has graciously allowed us to use his model for helping Southern California residents.

EXHIBITION INCLUDES NOW ICONIC OBAMA POSTER

SHEPARD FAIREY: SUPPLY AND DEMAND
FEB. 6 – AUG. 16, 2009

Boston, MA – On the 20th anniversary of the Obey Giant campaign, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston opens the first museum survey of Shepard Fairey, the influential street artist who created the now iconicObama poster. Stickers and posters of the artist’s work have appeared on street signs and buildings around the world as part of a guerrilla art campaign of global scale. Featuring over 80 works, Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand traces the artist’s career over 20 years, from theObey Giant stencil to screen prints of political revolutionaries and rock stars to recent mixed-media works and a new mural commissioned for the ICA show. In complement to the exhibition, Fairey will be creating public art works at sites around Boston. On view at the ICA from Feb. 6 to Aug. 16, 2009, Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand is accompanied by an expanded, limited-edition version of Supply & Demand, the retrospective publication of the artist’s work.

“Shepard Fairey’s powerful and varied body of work has reached into all aspects of our visual culture, from political posters to T-shirts and album covers, and now museum installations,” says Jill Medvedow, Director of the ICA/Boston. “His integration of design, popular culture, and politics places him in the current of artistic and cultural forces that shape our world today.”

“The content of Fairey’s work is a call to action about hierarchies and abuses of power, politics and the commodification of culture, “says Pedro H. Alonzo, who co-curated the ICA exhibition with Emily Moore Brouillet. “Fairey is committed to creating work that has meaning for his audience – by using familiar cultural iconography that people can relate to and by constantly bringing his work into the public sphere.”

Fairey gained international recognition in the early 1990s with his Obey Giant campaign, seen on streets around the world through the countless stickers and posters that Fairey produced and disseminated. Since then, Fairey has created works of art of all types – on the street, as part of commercial collaborations, and, increasingly, for gallery presentation. Fairey has broken many of the spoken and unspoken rules of contemporary art and culture. Working as a “fine” artist, commercial artist, graphic designer and businessman, Fairey actively resists categorization. Through the Obey project, he has created a cultural phenomenon, but more importantly, a new model of art making and production. He builds off precedents set by artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, as he disrupts expectations about art and business, and muddies the distinctions between fine art and commercial art.

Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand features work in a wide variety of media – screen prints, stencils, stickers, rubylith illustrations, collages, and works on wood, metal and canvas. These works reflect the diversity of Fairey’s aesthetic, displaying a variety of influences and references such as Soviet propaganda, psychedelic rock posters, images of Americana, and the layering and weathering of street art. While his visually seductive imagery draws in his audience, Fairey uses his work as a platform to make statements on social issues important to him. The artist explains his driving motivation: “The real message behind most of my work is ‘question everything.”

Initiated by former ICA assistant curator Emily Moore Brouillet and developed by guest curator Pedro H. Alonzo, the retrospective exhibition examines prevailing themes in Fairey’s work including Anti-War/Peace, Leaders of Change, Hierarchies of Power, Music, Excesses of Capitalism, and Activism.   

Shepard Fairey was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1970 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.  He received a BA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1991.  He has had recent solo exhibitions at White Walls Gallery, San Francisco (2008); Merry Karnowsky Gallery, Los Angeles (2007); Jonathan Levine Gallery, New York (2007); Stolen Space, London (2007); and Galerie Magda Danysz, Paris (2006).  His work is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Fairey is also the founder of Studio Number One, a graphic design company.

Media sponsor: Boston Phoenix
Official hotel sponsor: Renaissance Boston  

Publication
Shepard Fairey’s first museum survey is accompanied by an expanded, limited-edition version of Supply & Demand, the retrospective catalogue of the artist’s work published by Gingko Press, in association with Obey Giant.  In addition to existing content, the catalogue will include a special supplement with an introductory essay by Emily Moore Brouillet, a conversation between the artist and the curator, and an essay by musician and author Henry Rollins.      

Press Preview
A media preview of Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand will take place on Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2009, at 9:30 a.m. RSVP to Colette Randall at 617-478-3181 or crandall@icaboston.org

Exhibition-related Programs
OBEY Experiment
Friday, Feb. 6, 2009
8 pm – midnight
On the opening night of his first museum survey, artist Shepard Fairey DJs at the ICA’s wildly popular Experiment. Tickets: $25 general admission; $20 members and students with valid ID. 21 +

About the ICA
An influential forum for multi-disciplinary arts, The Institute of Contemporary Art has been at the leading edge of art in Boston for seventy years. Like its iconic building on Boston’s waterfront, the ICA offers new ways of engaging with the world around us. Its exhibitions and programs provide access to contemporary art, artists, and the creative process, inviting audiences of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the excitement of new art and ideas. The Institute of Contemporary Art, located at 100 Northern Avenue, is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 am – 5 pm; Thursday and Friday, 10 am – 9 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 10 am – 5 pm. Admission is $12 adults, $10 seniors and students, and free for members and children 17 and under. Free admission on Target Free Thursday Nights, 5-9 pm. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our Web site at www.icaboston.org.

21 world-renowned Artists have generously donated a Sketch for Change to benefit Barack Obama’s Campaign. Please visit thier Ebay page. Auction Ends Oct 25th.

They’re also inviting folks around the world to Submit a Sketch for Change to be part of a group art show on election eve! 

From Sketch for Change:

We’re a group of folks from Los Angeles that started having Thursday Dinners to raise money for Barack Obama’s Campaign for Change. Dinners soon became a place to brainstorm other ways to help more, fromphone banking to registering friends to vote early.
Sketch for Change is one of the ideas we cooked up over dinner.

We invited twenty-one amazing artists attending the recent Baby Tattooville Art Retreat to contribute an original drawing to benefit Barack Obama’s Campaign for Change. All work was generously donated.

Contributing Artists Include: Ana Bagayan, Gary Baseman, Glenn Barr,Tim Biskup, Luke Chueh, Dave Cooper, Ara Devejian, Bob Dob, Gris Grimly, Thomas Han, Julita Januszewska, James Jean, Joe Ledbetter,Lola, Brandi Milne, Mark Murphy, Daniel Peacock, Shag, Jeff Soto,Nathan Spoor, and Amanda Visell.

The 21 original drawings will be auctioned off on Ebay, ending October 25th, to raise funds for Barack Obama’s final push towards the general election in November.

We also invite submissions from anyone in the world that would like to contribute a Sketch for Change. Click Here To Submit Your Sketch For Change.

Regime Change Starts at Home

Shepard Fairey, Al Farrow, Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky)

October 18 – December 6, 2008

Irvine Contemporary is pleased to announce the exhibition Regime Change Starts at Home with new works by Shepard Fairey, Al Farrow, and Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky).

Opening reception with the artists, Saturday, October 18, 6-8PM.

Shepard Fairey, internationally known for his iconic street art and graphics, will present nine new politically charged paintings and collage works on canvas and paper, including the last of three unique, large-format, hand-painted and collaged portraits of Barack Obama.

A new limited-edition print created specifically for the exhibition will accompany the artist’s unique hand-finished works. In his first exhibition in Washington, DC, Al Farrow will present welded metal sculptures of religious structures, which are composed entirely of gun parts, bullets, artillery shells, and human bone. The works form striking commentaries on the militarism embedded in the histories of the three major religions. Farrow’s Christian reliquaries (in a series ironically titled “The Trigger Finger of Santo Guerro”) and exact-scale replicas of a Jewish synagogue and a Moslem mosque are based on historical models for which Farrow assembles appropriated gun parts symbolically related to the three religions.

The exhibition will premier Paul D. Miller’s (DJ Spooky) new multimedia project, Manifesto for the People’s Republic of Antarctica, which is based on his current work on the political and environmental issues surrounding Antarctica. Miller’s installation will combine a new video work with a series of posters and graphics that comment on Antarctica as a contested continent with a long and often suppressed political history.

About the Artists

Shepard Fairey’s paintings and prints have been widely exhibited in galleries around the world,and his iconic street art, recognized worldwide under his Obey Giant identity, is now amongthe most widely known urban art of our time. His works are in the collections of the Museum ofModern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. His work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, TIME, Salon.com, The Los Angeles Times, Wired, Juxtapoz, Swindle, and many other publications. Two monographs on the artist’s work and career have been published by Gingko Press: Obey: Supply and Demand (2006) and E Pluribus Venom (2008).

Shepard Fairey will have a retrospective exhibition at the Boston Institute for Contemporary Art in February, 2009. Shepard Fairey is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives and works in Los Angeles.

Al Farrow has been a metal sculptor for 20 years, and his reliquaries and religious structures made from gun parts, bullets, and artillery shells have been exhibited in San Francisco at the Catherine Clark Gallery and in major museums. His work is in many important collections around the world, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the De Young Museum,and major private collections in New York, Germany, Italy, and Hong Kong. The De Young Museum in San Francisco will present a solo exhibition of his works in November, 2008. Al Farrow lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area.

Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) is a conceptual artist, musician, and writer based in New York. Miller’s work as a media artist has been presented in multiple venues over the past ten years, including The Smithsonian Portrait Gallery (2008), The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (November, 2007), the Venice Biennale (2007), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2004), the Whitney Biennial (2001), Mass MOCA (2003/2004), and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2002). As a musician, Miller has composed and recorded a huge volume of music (with a discography of over 100 titles), and he has collaborated with musicians and composers in almost every category from hip-hop, jazz, rock, electronic, and reggae to classical and conceptual. Miller has written two acclaimed books, Rhythm Science (MIT Press, 2004) and Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on sound art and contemporary music (MIT Press, 2008). Miller is currently working on film and sound projects on Antarctica, both a feature film with original music, Terra Nova: the Antarctic Suite, and an editioned multimedia video and graphics project, Manifesto for The People’s Republic of Antarctica, which will be presented in this exhibition.

For further information, please contact Lauren Gentile, Assistant Director & Director of Sales (lauren@irvinecontemporary.com). Press and media contact: Martin Irvine, Director (martin@irvinecontemporary.com). Phone: 202-332-8767.

MISSION
ART FOR OBAMA is an online auction of photographs to benefit the Obama Campaign. Fifty of the country’s most prominent artists and photographers have donated their work for this cause. All proceeds will be donated to MoveOn.org, one of the most, if not the single-most, effective advocacy groups for the Obama campaign. Due to strict Democratic National Committee and Federal Election Commission regulations, we cannot legally donate directly to the Obama campaign or to the Democratic National Committee.

WHO WE ARE
ART FOR OBAMA is a group of five artists who have come together to help the Obama campaign. Because we cannot afford to make large donations ourselves, we want to bring together the leaders of our community to help create change. We are all unpaid volunteers.

AHNDRAYA PARLATO, founder of ART FOR OBAMA, is a photographer currently teaching at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. Her work can been seen at ahndrayaparlato.com.

ELIZABETH MOY is a photographer currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work can be seen atelizabethmoy.com. She is also founder of Two Ships Press, a small publishing company that specializes in limited edition photography books.

GREGORY HALPERN lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he is an Instructor of Photography at Harvard University. His work can be seen at gregoryhalpern.com.

WHITNEY HUBBS received her BFA in photography from the California College of the Arts. Currently she is pursuing her MFA in photography at UCLA. Her work can seen atwhitneyhubbs.com as well as in the current issue of Blindspot Magazine.

DRU DONOVAN grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 2004, she received her BFA in photography from the California College of the Arts. Currently she is in her second year at Yale pursuing her MFA in photography. Her work can be seen at drudonovan.com.

Marc Asnin
REBBI, 30″ X 40″ C-Prin, from the New York Times Magazine story “The Oracle of Crown,” 1992. Rabbi Schneerson is the spiritual leader of the Lubavitch movement lecturing his followers at their world headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn, NY.
Edition: 5/15

VoteForChange.com, a voter registration program of the Obama campaign, is asking active and creative supporter help spread the word on voter registration through an online submission which can include: make a video, write a song, take a photo, or paint a mural about VoteForChange.com. One of the artists asked to participate is Tristan Easton. Thunderdog has released 1 of 3 Limited Edition silkscreen VoteForChange posters at the Thunderdog Web-Store.