Artist Shepard Fairey, who created the iconic HOPE and CHANGE poster of President Barack Obama’s campaign, is back in the spotlight this week with a new image of the president — and the popping-up of its antithesis.
His newest depiction of Obama, appearing on the cover of the Aug. 20 Rolling Stone, shows Obama from more of a profile, his face wrought with determination in Fairey’s signature blue and red style found in the poster that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
The presidential seal has been added, creating what appears to be a halolike ring of stars around his head. The headline — “Will he take bold action or compromise too easily?” — enshrines his head.
“It’s one thing to be running for president and it’s another to be president and I think this new illustration that I did hopefully captures the complexity and the weight of his new role,” Fairey said, when asked him he attempted to make the president appear godlike.
On the other end of the spectrum, Los Angeles was hit last week by a different graffiti artist who altered Fairey’s campaign image, infamously combining it with Heath Ledger’s Joker from “Batman Returns.”
“I have my doubts about the person’s intelligence,” Fairey told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s not grammatically correct. It would be ‘socialist’ … Obama is not Marx. He didn’t create socialism.”
