Mayday: The Art of Shepard Fairey
The book of Mayday, Shepard Fairey's 2010 exhibition that closed Deitch Projects in New York, a distress call and a celebration of the renewal that revolutionary movements promise.
The collection is built around portraits of advocates for the working class and the oppressed. Fairey argues that artists, musicians and writers such as Joe Strummer, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Woody Guthrie and Cornel West all have a part in stirring a response to injustice, and the works layer his stencil and collage vocabulary of stars, stripes and printed ephemera over these figures. Essays by writer and filmmaker Antonino D'Ambrosio and gallerist Jeffrey Deitch accompany 134 colour illustrations. The book is bound in flag-patterned pictorial boards with a gilt-stamped black cloth spine and was issued without a jacket.
Fairey (b. 1970) founded the OBEY Giant campaign in 1989 and by 2010 had moved from street stickers to museum retrospectives, following the Obama Hope poster and the 2009 ICA Boston survey. Mayday is the third Gingko Press volume on his work, after Supply & Demand and E Pluribus Venom.
