Photo © Patrick McMullan Photography

Shepard Fairey

Courtesy Jonathan Levine Gallery

Shepard Fairey, "War for Sale"

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NEW YORK—One night in June, one of Shepard Fairey’s assistants scaled a low-rise New York building with a bucket of paste and a poster under his arm. But just before he got to his task—affixing a Fairey-designed work one flight above street level—a security guard spotted him and came running. The assistant, a seasoned installer of illicit artwork, indicated he was leaving the premises without trouble, but the guard tried to physically restrain him anyway and punches were thrown. The night ended with the would-be installer fleeing down the street, bucket and poster still in hand.

Assisting an artist can mean a lot of different things—the position can be an opportunity to work side-by-side with a role model or a nine-to-five administrative grind—but for a few of Fairey’s employees, the job has the unusual demand of working on the wrong side of the law. "I always tell my assistants," said Fairey, who has been arrested some 13 times while installing his work, "unless you are willing to go to jail—particularly in New York, where they have a really good undercover vandal squad—don't go out with me."

Fairey, who was installing a solo show at a Brooklyn project space run by Jonathan LeVine Gallery the night his assistant was nearly apprehended, owes his current popularity to street art. He got his start in 1989, when, as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, he created stickers and posters bearing stylized portraits of the professional wrestler Andre the Giant (who died in 1993). Over the next decade, Fairey positioned this signature image in public spaces all over the world. Eventually carrying the cryptically menacing slogan "OBEY" and rendered in a style that apes Constructivist propaganda, it became a globally recognized icon.

Now 37, Fairey has evolved a style that is still heavily graphic, but more complex. He has also expanded his practice to include commercial commissions for high-profile clients—including a poster for the Oscar-winning film Walk the Line and an advertorial for Adidas—founded the lifestyle magazine Swindle, started his own clothing line, and also made a name for himself in the mainstream art world, creating one-off and editioned works sold in galleries and included in exhibitions at major museums, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

To crank out his more commercial work, Fairey employs a staff of six graphic designers at his Los Angeles design firm, Studio Number One, as well as a team of interns who not only handle the dirty work of refining hand-drawn borders, photographs, and other elements in the artist's signature hard-edge compositions but also offer creative input. Yet when it comes to his fine art, Fairey controls the process more tightly. He begins his gallery-bound pieces at the design studio, where he transfers sketched concepts onto stencils and silk-screen film, and then completes them by hand at a second, smaller studio in his garage with help from Jason Filipow, his assistant of four years.

Still a Street Kid
But even though Fairey has shown in galleries for more than a decade and has gained commercial success, he has never stopped making work for the street. He installs a large percentage of his illicit public art himself, and in addition to Filipow and the staff at his design firm, he keeps a few assistants on hand who help get those pieces up—at the risk of arrest.

With the stakes much higher than those at an average studio job, most of Fairey's street assistants have been recruited from among his friends. "There's a lot of risk involved," he says. "Usually somebody is not going to take that kind of risk unless it's for something that they feel passionate about."

Though not a street artist himself, Stuart Noble nevertheless began helping Fairey years ago, scouting locations for his work all over London. Now based in Los Angeles, he regularly assists Fairey on street art projects and helps in a more official capacity in the studio. Another co-conspirator, Dan Flores, roomed with one of Fairey's employees and then volunteered to go out and put up work himself. Both Noble and Flores regularly travel with Fairey to assist with curbside installations, and they have a street-honed sense of the risks involved and an understanding of how not to get caught.

To reduce risk, the artist has kept his methods and materials simple, even as his work has grown more elaborate. Most of his recent pieces can be installed by a single person in under ten minutes. The piece War for Sale, a version of which is mounted on a brick wall on Roebling Street in Brooklyn, for example, is a large composition in the style of a psychedelic-era antiwar poster with Art Nouveau details. It has far more depth and color than any of the surrounding graffiti—and most of the advertising—on the street, but its construction follows basic principles of covert postering.

The work began as two three-by-six-foot sheets of paper with a black outline of the image photocopied onto them. In the studio, interns filled in the outline with paint. Then both sheets were stained to give the work a cream color and control somewhat the appearance of aging on the paper, which would soon be exposed to the elements. The piece went up without incident in June—a single assistant affixed both pieces to the wall in under six minutes—and (as of this writing) has yet to be taken down.

Despite the job's unusual hazards, assistants who install Fairey's street projects tend to have the same fundamental skills as their more traditional counterparts in the studio. Each time they find locations and install work on the street, they participate in his practice. To that end, understanding Fairey's process and ultimate vision are paramount—context is all important when it comes to street art—but unlike a painter's assistant, a street assistant must exercise sensitivity to the artist's intention while dodging the police.

"I work with people who have gone out with me before and understand how I like stuff done," Fairey said. "I need to know that they really get it."