The Street Artist Who Won’t Quit: The Story Of Shepard Fairey

How The “Hope” Poster Came About

The Barack Obama “Hope” Poster is arguably Fairey’s most well-known work, aside from his OBEY Giant legacy. He originally used the word “PROGRESS” on the poster, thinking that Obama would hit the status quo towards social progress. “I did the poster without any input from the campaign—I just did it as a grassroots thing… when I heard that [the campaign] did like the image, my friend who was sort of the liaison said, ‘They love the image, but they really like the word HOPE or CHANGE better…'” Fairey explained, adding that he decided to go with HOPE because, “It’s also hard to be anti-hope.”