Frank Shepard Fairey or Shepard Fairey, also known as OBEY, is an American street artist, screen printer, muralist and illustrator born February 15, 1970, in Charleston, South Carolina.
Coming from the skateboarding scene, he first became known for the André the Giant Has a Posse stickers, which gave rise to the Obey Giant campaign.

​

For the 2008 US presidential campaign, he created the "HOPE" poster of Barack Obama, which became an iconic image of the campaign. The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston considers him one of the best-known, best and most influential street art artists of the moment.

​

In June 2016, Shepard Fairey and his team painted two new frescoes in the 13th arrondissement of Paris:

​

The first, "Delicate Balance" is produced on the occasion of his Earth Crisis exhibition at the Itinerrance gallery.

​

The second, at the intersection of Boulevard Vincent-Auriol and Rue Nationale in Paris and Saint-Denis: a Marianne surrounded by the motto "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" is painted after the attacks of November 13, 2015. 

Frank Fairey was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. His father was a doctor. He started drawing on t-shirts or skateboards at the age of 14. Fairey graduated from Wando High School in 1988. While entering the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1989, he created the André the Giant Has a Posse sticker campaign, which led to the Obey Giant campaign. He graduated from RISD in 1992, with a Master of Arts. He currently lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and daughters.

​

Using the slogan The Medium is the Message borrowed from Marshall McLuhan, Fairey has become one of the most well-known artists of the 2000s. Originally part of the BLK/MRKT graphic design group with other graphic designers, Fairey left the group in 2003 and joined Studio Number One. In 2004, Fairey, Robbie Conal and Mear One produced a series of "anti-war, anti-Bush" posters for the Post Gen collective for a street art campaign entitled "Be the Revolution".

​

His work is present in the collections of the Smithsonian, the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His first retrospective in a museum took place at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2009.

​

He continued his graffiti activities, however, and was arrested by the police again in February 2009.

​

Fairey also DJs in many clubs under the names DJ Diabetic and Emcee Insulin because he is diabetic.

​

The Class Art Biarritz gallery offers multiple signed and numbered serigraphs by Shepard Fairey.