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Obama and Hope: Thoughts on Originality, Shepard Fairey, Virgil Abloh and Maurizio Cattelan’s Banana
Back in happier days when things weren’t so aggressive and toxic in our public discourse, the artist Shepard Fairey created an image that spoke to the idea that people had the power to change things for the better through the political process. The artwork was called Hope, and it quickly became the defining image of Barack Obama’s first presidential election campaign in 2008.
Shepard Fairey is an artist and an activist. His goal is to get people to question power and the way it circulates in our society with provocative images about sexism, racism, climate change, police brutality and social justice issues. Throughout his career he has distributed his work on city streets around the world as wheat paste posters, stickers and stencilled graffiti.
At the start of Obama’s 2008 campaign Fairey was so inspired by the charismatic senator that he quickly knocked up the Hope image, based on a photo of Obama he had found on the internet. He transformed the photo with his signature high-contrast stencil technique, printed off a load of posters and pasted them up on walls. And from that small start it took off. Hope became one of the most recognisable images of the 21st century.
