Street artist will get day in court for pasting up his art
Shepard Fairey is scheduled to face charges in a Boston courtroom tomorrow for allegedly pasting art without permission on two local sites that police discovered last month - one under the Boston University Bridge and the other above Storrow Drive.
Fairey was arrested Friday just as he was about to enter the Institute of Contemporary Art for a scheduled performance.
The artist, who lives in Los Angeles, rose to national fame last year for creating the red, white, and blue image of Barack Obama emblazoned with the word HOPE, iconography that was adopted and popularized by campaign supporters.
Fairey's work is the subject of a new exhibit at the ICA, where he was scheduled to appear as a guest disc jockey at a sold-out event before he was arrested at 9:15 p.m. outside the Seaport District museum. The artist spent the night in a South End police lockup before being bailed out yesterday morning, said Officer Eddy Chrispin, a spokesman for the Boston Police Department.
In the weeks leading up to the show, Fairey's colorful posters appeared on buildings, in city squares, and on the backs of public structures in and around Boston, including a 50-foot banner that the artist unfurled last week on the side of City Hall, with the city's permission.
But police were less pleased with the placement of the other works, obtaining a pair of warrants for property defacement - one for an image that Fairey pasted on a railroad trestle under the BU Bridge and one for an image above Storrow Drive in Allston, Chrispin said, likening the acts to graffiti.
One of the warrants came from Roxbury District Court and one came from Brighton District Court. Fairey could be arraigned at either court tomorrow, Chrispin said.
A spokeswoman for Fairey said yesterday that the artist hopes to "resolve the matter quickly and amicably with the Boston police."
Jennifer Gross, the spokeswoman, said Fairey was unavailable for an interview.
At the ICA, people attending the exhibit said they were surprised that Fairey was arrested.
"It seems like police resources could be better spent than cracking down on public expression," said Adam Loreau, 26, who works in Boston. Loreau defended Fairey, saying, "It's hard to get art in public space."
Inside the museum, Katie Coleman, a 55-year-old from New Haven, said the Fairey exhibition was one of the main reasons she came to Boston this weekend. Coleman said she was unfamiliar with the artist until she saw his image of Obama, but researched him on the Internet and became a fan of his work.
She was not happy with the arrest.
"It was so mean-spirited to do it last night. It's not like he doesn't show up anywhere else," said Coleman, who said she considers graffiti acceptable as long as it is not destructive. "Most of it is self-expression and pretty harmless."
Rebecca Oliver, a student at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, called the arrest "nonsense."
"It's art, it's not like he's vandalizing, ruining property."
But Chris Cultrera, a 23-year-old Wentworth student attending the exhibit with Oliver, said the police were enforcing the law. "I can't say I feel bad," Cultrera said, waiting in line for tickets. But "I still support his art."
Fairey, whose poster and street art echoes and tweaks political campaigns, propaganda, and advertising, is a South Carolina native and Rhode Island School of Design graduate who two decades ago created a stylized, stenciled image of the wrestler Andre the Giant that wound up emblazoned on the backs of stop signs and alongside urban buildings across the country.
That laid the groundwork for Fairey's "Obey Giant" art campaign, which had quietly but steadily grown in popularity before Fairey's fame exploded with the Obama image. The artist has been arrested more than a dozen times.
The "Supply and Demand" show at the ICA is a retrospective of Fairey's work.
The museum's website includes an online map pointing out more than a dozen places in and around Boston where his work can be seen - though not the two that prompted his arrest. 