André the Giant Has a Posse

Shepard Fairey created the "André the Giant Has a Posse" sticker campaign in 1989 in Charleston, South Carolina. Distributed largely by skaters, the Andre stickers began showing up in nearly every big city across the U.S.A. At the time Fairey declared the campaign to be "an experiment in phenomenology." Over time the artwork has been reused in a number of ways and has become a world-wide movement. Simultaneously, Fairey's work has evolved stylistically and semantically into the OBEY Giant campaign.

"André the Giant has a Posse" sticker on a stop sign

Fairey and campaign co-creators, Michael Meinhart, Blaize Blouin, Alfred Hawkins, and Mike Mongo Nicholl created paper and vinyl stickers and posters with an image of the wrestler André the Giant and the text "ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE 7' 4", 520lb", as an in-joke directed at hip hop and skater subculture, and then began clandestinely (and somewhat fanatically) propagating and posting them in Providence, Rhode Island and the Eastern United States.
By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of paper and then vinyl stickers were photocopied and hand-silkscreened and put in visible places throughout the world, primarily in culturally influential urban settings in the United States, such as Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco, but also in places which travellers often visited such as Greece, London, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, and the Caribbean Islands. In effect, Fairey and associates were creating a 'posse' of a wide audience of those who were in on the joke and willing to spread the message, and those who were not but found the original image compelling.

Threat of a lawsuit from Titan Sports, Inc. in 1998 spurred Fairey to stop using the trademarked name André the Giant, and to create a more iconic image of the wrestler's face, now most often with the equally iconic branding OBEY. The "OBEY" slogan was not only a parody of propaganda, but also a direct homage to the "OBEY" signs found in the 1988 cult classic film, They Live, starring Roddy Piper.

Shepard Fairey in an Elizabeth Daniels portrait

OBEY sticker with Make Art Not War poster in NYC 2004

Over time, Fairey's artistic imagery has evolved into a sometimes subtle, sometimes not, parody of a range of iconic styles, mostly a juxtaposition of popular political propagandas and multi-national commercialism. It usually bears the text OBEY Giant. In addition to countless small stickers, OBEY Giant has been spread by stencil, murals, and large wheatpaste posters, covering public spaces from abandoned building faces and street sign backs, to commercial spaces such as billboards and bus stop posters.