Icon Me!

From HERE.
Go make your own!

By now, everyone has seen the multitude of iconic Hope, Progress, and Change images of Barack Obama leading up to the election, so you can probably guess that the icon generator is 'inspired' Shephard Fairey's posters.

In a recent article on NPR,
"Fairey says he made the image to spur voters' belief in Obama as a leader. The image was never officially adopted by the campaign, however, because of legal issues related to the original photograph he used."

More info about Shephard Fairey HERE, and check out the multitude of his images at his site OBEY GIANT.

But you may or may not know that he got his start as a street artist, putting up sticker graffiti around Charleston, SC. One of his earliest images is of Andre the Giant:

From a May, 2001 article in the Observer Eccentric newspaper:

"Fairey created the first version of this image and made sticker copies of it at a local Kinko’s. He declared to his skateboard buddies what would lead to a worldwide phenomenon “obey giant has a Posse.” What started out as a joke among friends about the 7-foot-4, 520 pound pro wrestler manifested into something beyond his imagination. “He was so ugly, but so fascinating looking,” said Fairey, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. “He was the first freak of nature who was able to turn that into a lucrative career.”

Fairey began putting stickers around town wherever he went. There was no hidden meaning, no attempt to promote or sell something. Andre simply became his pet public art project. The mystery captured attention. “People wanted to know what it was about,” he said."

Eventually, the Andre imaged morphed into this:

Later images became both more sophisticated, and often more politically jagged.

This one almost made me wreck my car when I saw it on a light pole a few years ago; first I was trying to read it, then I had to work to stop laughing. It really hit my cynical funny bone: