“It just felt like weren’t part of the art world,” the curator recalls. When Alonzo first became acquainted with Fairey’s oeuvre, the art world drew a definite line between street art and fine art. The latter has worked with the artist since his groundbreaking Boston Institute of Contemporary Art retrospective in 2009. And now he’s fully embraced inside its walls in a thought-provoking show curated by Pedro H. The show is a homecoming of sorts for the artist - his last entrée in the Dallas gallery was when he created a series of murals commissioned for the institution nearly a decade ago. You’ll find that vibe in full effect at Backward Forward, on view at the Dallas Contemporary, 161 Glass St., through March 19. The innovation of hip-hop, of taking other people’s raw materials and making something that feels brand new, fresh and exciting - that’s where I’m coming from.” But I am influenced by that remix and sampling culture.

“I’m not an appropriation artist like the way that some people say - I make my own illustrations. “ by the DIY ethos of punk rock and skateboarding and then later hip-hop,” says Fairey of his work. It makes sense that both rapper Chuck D and Black Flag’s Henry Rollins flew to Dallas to hang with the artist at the Dallas Contemporary’s recent fundraising gala. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Smithsonian and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and there are still remnants of his early punky attitude. And his 2017 “We the People” series portraying Native Americans, African Americans, Muslims and Latina women ironically had Trump supporters at D.C.’s Women’s March lining up to take the posters home.Įmerging fully formed from the street art iconography of the late ‘80s, Fairey first got noticed for the wheat-pasted “Andre the Giant has a Posse” imagery when he was still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. Barack Obama made a moment of grassroots activism an iconic image for the ages.

From his early days as an outlaw street artist to his current role as a darling of the art world, he never shies away from the beauty and the dark undercurrent of American culture. Shepard Fairey has built a reputation for challenging the establishment.

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