POPAGANDA: The Obama HOPE Poster

How Shepard Fairey’s work went from the streets of Los Angeles to the Smithsonian permanent collection, and how he helped elect a president in the process.

On January 31, 2008, CNN held a debate in Los Angeles in preparation for the Super Tuesday Primary. After, Barack Obama, who was to that point still the contender for the nomination, and not the champion, held a rally at the Avalon Club in Los Angeles. He stood on the stage in a dark gray suit without a tie, looking and sounding intellectually exhausted from an evening spent arguing—if congenially—with Senator Clinton. He was delivering an improvised speech, reiterating the themes of progress and change he had brandished during his campaign. He looked down at the stage for a moment, touched his temple with his right index finger, and began, in an attempt perhaps to elaborate on these messages that had grown a little stale, even to him, “[The argument I’m making] is not about change, it’s about hope.” Here he squinted out into the dark crowd and pointed. “I talk about hope a lot,” he continued. “There’s a big sign, there. Very nice graphic, by the way.”

In the audience a man was holding a poster that depicted an optimistic Obama, with his head tilted, gazing at the heavens, or in this unique case, back at Obama himself. Below his bust was printed the word HOPE. The crowd seemed to have anticipated Obama’s acknowledgment of the image, because as he did so they erupted into applause. The man with the sign, Yosi Sargent, felt uncomfortable with the sudden attention. In the footage I have seen of the rally, only Yosi’s hands are visible, gripping the poster on the upper edge and lower corner, as if in that moment the image were his surrogate. “I’m definitely not used to being the center of attention,” Yosi told me in March. “The man on the stage was supposed to be the focus.” Yosi has a high voice and is tirelessly sincere. “It was an amazing moment,” he added, “because what it meant was that a large piece of my life—supporting Barack Obama, printing these posters and putting up stickers—was actually working. The image that Shepard created and the message coming out of Barack Obama’s mouth were perfectly in sync.”

The Shepard Yosi refers to here is Shepard Fairey—agit-pop artist, founder of Obey Giant, and until he saw Obama deliver his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, staunch political detractor. (He voted for Ralph Nader in 2000). If you have lived in a major metropolitan area over the last eight years, or even, say, a bucolic hamlet in Sweden, you may have seen a poster of President Bush looking rather confused, holding a bomb and asking, “Hug bombs and drop babies? Or was it hug babies and drop bombs,” an anonymous but no less ominous face suggesting, “More Militerry, Less Skools,” or later, after Fairey’s taste for exclusively heavy-handed, incendiary rhetoric had begun to subside, the more sedate and thoughtful image of a Chinese soldier with a flower in his rifle. But in early 2008, Fairey revised his approach further. To that point he had made a business of criticizing government propaganda by satirically approximating it. With the advent of Barack Obama’s bid for the Presidency, though, Fairey recognized that he had an opportunity to discard the cynic’s non-teleological anarchism that had always been his edict, and foster positive change by, rather unusually, supporting a presidential candidate.

When I first spoke with him last May, Fairey brought up the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he first saw Obama speak. “I didn’t think that Obama would run. I thought, ‘This guy’s young. And he looks even younger than he is. But he’s got a bright future. I’ll keep an eye out for him.’ Then, when he announced his candidacy, I was still skeptical, thinking that he was too new on the scene to get any traction. And then when he did well in Iowa and New Hampshire, I was like, ‘Hmm. All right, I think I might want to put some real energy into this.’”

In September 2007, at an Adidas-sponsored event in Los Angeles where Fairey was showing some of his collages, Yosi Sargent, who had met Fairey at a handful of gallery openings, walked up and started a conversation. “I saw an opportunity,” Sargent said. “I asked, ‘Who are you supporting for President?’ He said that he was a big fan of Barack Obama.”

Back in 2004, after President Bush had won a second term, Sargent had helped found 008themovement.org—a group dedicated to grassroots Democratic mobilization—and even before Obama had declared his candidacy, Sargent and his cohorts had been planning to get him elected. “After the last election cycle,” Sargent told me, “a bunch of people were fed up. We pooled our resources and our energy and decided to do whatever we could to support the candidate that we thought would be the best for the country. And that of course was Barack Obama.” From 2004 to 2007, 008themovement.org had been preparing, or planning to prepare, some sort of assault on the Republicans. The group was made up mostly of artists, and it follows therefore that their attack, when it materialized, would be a visual one. They eventually decided that they would create, print, and disseminate pro-Obama posters to battleground precincts around the country. What they did not know, though, in the summer of 2007, was that almost every district in every state would be closely contested during the primary battle. If they were going to persuade the public with pictures, they would have to get one in every precinct. Getting one in every precinct would require a sort of pathogenic diffusion. They would use the internet as a vector, but in order to infect the general population, to continue this metaphor, they would need a rather hearty virus.

When Sargent spoke with Fairey in September and realized that they were both on the same political page, he also realized he was speaking with the foremost biological engineer in the world of virally spread guerrilla art. (From his headquarters—Studio Number One in downtown Los Angeles— Fairey designs, prints, and ships his posters internationally. His work appears in cities in all six temperate continents.) If Fairey would do a poster, Sargent reasoned, 008themovement.org had both its virus and a population of self-selected hosts—namely Fairey’s worldwide base of volunteer vandals who had been for years postering cities around the globe with Fairey’s satirical propaganda.

But Fairey was hesitant. “I started asking a couple people if they thought I would be a liability,” Fairey told me in May. “Usually I do whatever I want to do and don’t ask permission, but this was a case where I kind of wanted to have the proper go-ahead from people, because I didn’t want to undermine what Obama was doing. I want to help him.” Fairey, who has been arrested at least thirteen times for vandalism, didn’t expect the Obama camp to receive his endorsement cordially. “I didn’t want to do something for Obama if his campaign was gonna go, ‘Oh, God, why that guy? That’s a terrible affiliation.’”

But Sargent, through his fundraising work with 008themovement.org, had established some ties with the Obama campaign, and was able to broach the subject with them. “Yosi said he would talk to the people he knew and get back to me,” said Fairey. “And then he did, and he said, ‘Green light. Go ahead.’ And that’s when I started working on it.” This approval process did not, as the last few sentences might suggest, culminate in a single afternoon. Rather, from conception to execution, the PROGRESS poster that Yosi Sargent eventually held at the Avalon Club rally in late January, 2008, took four months to gestate. “When I finally got the go-ahead, it was only two weeks before Super Tuesday,” said Fairey. “It was the middle of January.” Before Super Tuesday, most of the country, including Fairey and Sargent, expected a clear Democratic nominee to emerge from the twenty-two scheduled contests on February 5th. Accordingly, Fairey was under a severe deadline to create an iconic image, dump it into the vector, get his hosts contaminated, and help win Obama the nomination.

“I just basically went on the internet and looked for a good photo of Obama to work from,” said Fairey. His tone was decidedly nonchalant, as if instead of influencing a presidential election he’d been researching a college paper on which he only need a “C” to pass. “I do all my portraits based on references, even if I’m kind of splicing together a couple of different references. So, I found an image that I felt had the right gesture, and then, of course, did my thing to it—re-illustrated and simplified it to this really iconic, three-color image.” I had perhaps expected Fairey to speak in more elevated language about the creation of the first poster. He is the seminal American iconographist, the most successful pop artist since Warhol, and as he talked about his crowning achievement—the image that branded the eventual Democratic nominee for president, that may, historically, outlast the solemn countenance of Andre the Giant— he spoke pragmatically. “I made some screen prints. I sold three hundred and fifty screen prints to raise money for the bigger poster campaign, and then immediately did six thousand offset prints, which were the ones that went up in the period before Super Tuesday. Those got distributed right away, and then we immediately did another run of four thousand. So, therefore, within the first two weeks there were already ten thousand posters out. It’s up to like seventy thousand, now.”

That poster has since had an immeasurable effect. I use immeasurable in the vague but denotative sense that there is no accurate way to measure its import. In the run-up to Super Tuesday, after the New Hampshire primary in which Hillary Clinton pulled off a surprise victory in the narrow wake of Barack Obama’s Iowa caucus win, Obama became again the challenger, and not the challenged. Then Shepard Fairey got permission to release his posters. Clinton and Obama debated on CNN on January 31st in California. Super Tuesday arrived and the candidates’ constituents caucused and primaried. Obama won twelve more delegates than Clinton when all the votes were tallied. But he lost California by ten points, and California was the epicenter of Fairey’s postering. Following Super Tuesday, though, Obama rose in the polls, and between February 5th and March 5th, Obama won eleven straight contests and captured the pledged and superdelegate leads. If someone bolder than I chose to analyze these statistics with a bias toward Fairey’s influence on the election, he might say that Fairey’s posters tipped the balance of the Democratic scale away from Clinton. That is, of course, post hoc ergo propter hoc logic, and therefore fallacious. What is indisputable, though, is that no one made a poster for Clinton or McCain, and Obama’s grassroots base was the most active and vociferous, whether donating money, attending a rally, putting up posters of their candidate on the sides of buildings, or, finally, gathering at Grant Park in Chicago to celebrate his election.

“Hillary is fine,” said Fairey last May, as we discussed why he hadn’t ever endorsed another candidate. “I think that she acts a lot better when she’s on top. She’s a lot more personable. But a real ugly, nasty side of her has come out during this thing. But I still think she would be way better than McCain. But were she the only candidate, would I make art in support of her? Probably not.” (Yosi Sargent had made a very similar claim, but even more emphatic. “Can you imagine an artist making art for any other candidate?” he asked. “No, you can’t,” he answered for me.) Then Fairey added, “But Obama is great.” Hillary, by exclusion, in Fairey’s opinion, is not. “Obama is charismatic,” Fairey continued, “but he seems honest and truthful. A lot of people seem charismatic, but they would turn back the odometer on a used car they’re selling you. Obama doesn’t seem like that. But Mitt Romney? Come on. Would you buy a used car from that guy?” I asked him then why he hadn’t supported any other candidates in the past, and specifically, John Kerry in 2004.

“I wasn’t that inspired by Kerry,” he said. “Once again, it wasn’t that I wouldn’t have preferred him to be president. But I think that it has something to do with my own maturity. If someone didn’t jump out to me as super awesome, I wasn’t going to stick my neck out and endorse them because if anything went wrong then I’d have to own up to having been wrong about their character. It’s the whole hipster strategy: just boo everything, and only celebrate it if you’re the first person to discover it. Then if five more people discover it, you have to abandon it. That whole mentality of I’d-rather-just-criticize is something I’ve been conditioned to be part of to a degree. But now I’m like, ‘Fuck that. That’s stupid.’ I’ve got so much more riding on this election than my coolness cred.” He laughed before he went on. “In 2004, I did a lot of anti-Bush stuff—I was very opposed to Bush—which I guess was a de facto endorsement of Kerry. But I also realized that negativity wasn’t the best strategy for uniting people.”

I asked him if he’d finally come to the conclusion that art which attacks is limited if it doesn’t propose a solution. “Absolutely, yes,” said Fairey.

“This time,” I said, “it seems you’re trying to help find a solution, which seems novel, although it shouldn’t seem novel, but it is. It’s sort of unprecedented to say, rather than I hate this guy, I actually think this guy might solve the problems we’ve been complaining about.”

Fairey responded, “People have said to me, ‘That’s not very rebellious or outsider or subversive that you’re supporting a presidential candidate.’ And I say, ‘Well, when it’s somebody who’s going to get into office, and it’s not going to be business as usual, I think it’s pretty subversive, I think it’s pretty rebellious and radical. And if you don’t recognize that in this candidate, you need to start paying attention because this is an important opportunity.”

As an unofficial presidential marketing campaign, Fairey’s iconographic endorsement of Obama was unprecedented in both numerical scope and organic popularity. The image spread from person to person, from organization to organization, right up to Obama himself. On January 31, 2008, Obama acknowledged Fairey’s graphic at the Avalon Club, and on February 22nd, Fairey received a letter, apparently from Obama himself, in which the Junior Senator from Illinois thanked the senior guerilla artist from South Carolina for his encouragement. “Your images have a profound effect on people,” Obama wrote, “whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign. I am privileged to be a part of your artwork and proud to have your support.” A few weeks later, the Obama website had for sale in its official store Fairey’s CHANGE poster. It sold out by March.

In 1976, during the run-up to Jimmy Carter’s successful bid for the presidency, Andy Warhol made a print of Carter’s mother which, sold in limited edition, helped raise money for Carter’s campaign. Then, after the election, to commemorate the Inaugural Celebration, Warhol did a portrait of Jimmy Carter himself. But he did not paint one during the campaign, and Carter certainly didn’t use a Warhol print as part of his campaign branding. But Obama has used a piece of pop art, from a notorious and globally recognized agit-pop artist, to help define, quite literally, the face he shows to the world. (According to Yosi Sargent, Fairey is now expected to design Obama’s White House stationary).

At dinner with friends last spring, during my trip to Los Angeles to interview Shepard Fairey, the conversation at my table turned to politics. As this was only a few days after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, both of which Obama had won, there was amongst my rather young, liberal group of friends a sense of collective relief, as if Obama had finally clinched the nomination, even though he hadn’t. I mentioned the article I was working on, and I found most everyone had seen the posters Fairey had made for Obama. (Now, in early 2009, they are almost literally omnipresent). “Can anyone think of a time,” I asked, “when a presidential candidate used an image of himself as a primary campaign logo?” None of us had been alive during the Great Depression or the subsequent Great War, so we agreed unanimously that we hadn’t. Then a woman at the table said, “I suppose you see pictures like that of Castro in Cuba.” That reminded me of a trip I’d taken to Jordan in the fall of 2007. When I walked across the border from Israel I’d seen the huge, benevolent faces of King Hussein and his son, King Abdullah II. In fact, they had been everywhere, from the small, goat-herding villages along the highway, in Petra on a wall near my hotel, and in every shop throughout Amman.

In the United States there aren’t laudatory images of Bush hanging in stores or in living rooms, at bus stops or on billboards. But when Obama gets sworn in next Tuesday evening, thanks to Shepard Fairey’s efforts, his face will already be a ubiquitous, public image, like Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan, or King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia.

When discussing this with Fairey, we got on the subject of mock-propaganda—which, if anything, is how much of Fairey’s work might be classified. I said that his image of Obama, though, regardless of whether or not the message was HOPE or PROGRESS, was real government propaganda. “Propaganda has a sinister connotation,” Fairey said. “But I wrote a paper when I was a sophomore at the Rhode Island School of Design on political propaganda, coming from a position of moral integrity. Whether it’s pro a cause or against a cause, it’s propaganda either way. I see a role for both. It’s always interesting to hear people say, ‘Your stuff is just anti-advertising propaganda.’ It’s really not. Even the idea of using propaganda to encourage people to question advertising and other propaganda is propaganda. Blindly accepting every ad you see and not questioning it is the wrong way to go, and I have a superior alternative, which is getting you to question that stuff. That’s propaganda. Anti-propaganda propaganda.”

(Since I first published this article, Time magazine, for the Person of the Year issue, commissioned Fairey to design the cover depicting their nomination, President-Elect Barack Obama. And earlier this month, the Smithsonian Institute acquired a cotton-rag Obama HOPE collage for its permanent collection. Shit is crazy.)

By Kaelan Smith