Wall Stickers

André the Giant Has a Posse is a street art campaign based on an original design by Frank Shepard Fairey created in 1989 while Fairey was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). At the time Fairey declared the campaign to be "an experiment in phenomenology. more...

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" Over time the artwork has been reused in a number of ways and has become a world-wide movement, following in the footsteps of Ivan Stang's Church of the SubGenius and populist WWII icon Kilroy Was Here. At the same time, Fairey's work has evolved stylistically and semantically into the OBEY Giant campaign.

History

Fairey and campaign co-creators Blais Blouin, Alfred Hawkins, and Mongo Nikol created paper and vinyl stickers and posters with an image of the wrestler André the Giant and the text "ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE 7' 4", 520lb", as an in-joke directed at hip hop and skater subculture, and then began clandestinely (and somewhat fanatically) propagating and posting them in Providence, Rhode Island and the Eastern United States.

By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of paper and then vinyl stickers were photocopied and hand-silkscreened and put in visible places throughout the world, primarily in culturally influential urban settings in the United States, such as Philadelphia, New York City, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, but also in places which travellers often visited such as Greece, London, Mexico, Japan, Florida and the Caribbean Islands. In effect, Fairey and associates were creating a 'posse' of a wide audience of those who were in on the joke and willing to spread the message, and those who were not but found the original image profoundly irresistible.

Threat of a lawsuit from Titan Sports, Inc. in 1993 spurred Fairey to stop using the trademarked name André the Giant, and to create a more iconic image of the wrestler's face, now most often with the equally iconic branding OBEY.

Over time, Fairey's artistic imagery has evolved into a sometimes subtle, sometimes not, parody of a range of iconic styles, mostly a juxtaposition of popular political propagandas and multi-national commercialism. It usually bears the text OBEY Giant. In addition to countless small stickers, OBEY Giant has been spread by stencil, murals, and large wheatpaste posters, covering public spaces from abandoned building faces and street sign backs, to commercial spaces such as billboards and bus stop posters. Furthermore, the popular "OBEY" slogan and stylized Andre The Giant face continues to be reproduced on products ranging from art and clothing to home accessories and decor, considerably expanding the impact of the campaign through iconology based on an allegiance to media and popular culture in the guise of counterculture.

Fairey later used stencils to make posters on old wall paper: 'a simple way to make art for people who had seen my stuff on the street and wanted a piece'. As demands on his time grew, Fairey needed help disseminating his work. Gerardo Yepiz helped make stencils of many of Fairey's designs, and also found a die cutter to mass-produce the two most used Giant icons.

Read more at Wikipedia.org