being sold at a department store in San Francisco, California. 2008 ,
Georgia. 2023 In 1989 Fairey and fellow
Rhode Island School of Design student
Ryan Lesser, along with Blaize Blouin, Alfred Hawkins and Mike Mongo 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″, 520 lb". This text is a reference to Andre the Giant's billed height and weight of "7′ 4″, 520 lbs"—2.24 m, 236 kg. In an interview with
Format magazine in 2008, Fairey commented that: "The Andre the Giant
sticker was just a spontaneous, happy accident. I was teaching a friend how to make stencils in the summer of 1989, and I looked for a picture to use in the newspaper, and there just happened to be an ad for wrestling with André the Giant and I told him that he should make a stencil of it. He said 'Nah, I’m not making a stencil of that, that’s stupid!' but I thought it was funny so I made the stencil and I made a few stickers and the group of guys I was hanging out with always called each other The Posse, so it said Andre the Giant Has a Posse, and it was sort of appropriated from hip-hop slang –
Public Enemy,
N.W.A and
Ice-T were all using the word." What began as an
in-joke directed at
hip hop and
skater subculture In relation to the process of creating the OBEY Giant image Fairey has commented that "Well, the original Andre sticker took like 10 minutes, but the icon face…[OBEY Giant] that took me a couple of nights of hanging out at Kinko's until the wee hours. Because first I illustrated it, the whole face, based on the two sides of the analog Andre face. And then I decided which half of the face was more appealing, simplified that, mirrored it, and then I cut it out. You know, I did this all without a computer... ...These are all things that I can do very efficiently on the computer now, but it was all done by hand." "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" is also the title of a 1995 documentary short by
Helen Stickler, which was the first documentary to feature Shepard Fairey and chronicle his influential street art campaign. The film screened worldwide, most notably at the 1997
Sundance Film Festival. In 2003, Village Voice film critic
Ed Halter described the film as: "legendary" and "a canonical study of a Gen-X media manipulation. One of the keenest examinations of '90s
underground culture". Nick Mount, a contributor for
The Walrus, commented that "Following the example set by gallery art, some street art is more about the concept than the art,". "'Fuck Bush' isn’t an aesthetic; it’s an ethic. Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant stickers and
Akay's Akayism posters are clever children of
Duchamp, ironic conceptual art." OBEY Giant began with a sticker and later expanded to include prints, murals, clothing, and other media. In the documentary "
Exit Through the Gift Shop", directed by Banksy, Fairey can be seen on the streets of Los Angeles in around 2002 putting up sticker art that is very similar in design to the very first Andre the Giant has a Posse stickers that were created. He is also seen putting up the new OBEY giant image on paste ups including one paste up that is roughly 4 metres by 4 metres in size. ==Parodies==