Shepard Fairey’s inauguration posters offer a new hope for political art in Trump’s America
In 2008, street artist Shepard Fairey created a poster for Barack Obama’s US presidential election campaign. The simple red, beige and blue stencilled image of Obama’s face over the word “HOPE” quickly became the iconic image of the election. The simple message (effectively Obama = Hope) perfectly reflected the mood of citizens disillusioned with the America of George W Bush and looking a fresh alternative. For many, the poster represented the key rallying cry around which the election was fought and won. In 2017, as Obama leaves the White House, it remains the enduring iconic image representing his presidency. However, reflecting upon eight years of the political realities of office, this once simple image has taken on a much greater complexity of emotional baggage. Not all who invested their hope in Obama in 2008 have received the expected return. For these, the image becomes a bittersweet reminder of promised hope ultimately unfulfilled. When asked in an interview in 2015 whether he thought Obama had lived up to the promise of his poster Fairey answered bluntly
“Not even close. […] Obama has had a really tough time, but there have been a lot of things that he’s compromised on that I never would have expected.”
In Fairey’s poster Obama thoughtfully looks upwards and to the right, off into the distance towards the future hopes of the nation. This is not Barack Obama the man, but rather a heroic, idealised, abstracted icon of the idea of Obama the icon. The Obama icon symbolises the promise of things yet to come, yet even to be imagined. Hope is promised, but nothing specific. The viewer projects their own desires into the Obama icon’s imagination. How could one man fulfil the individual hopes of millions of citizens? For all its inspirational power, the poster set itself up to fail by making a personal promise it could not keep. Once held up as an example of how the political poster could help to bring about positive change in the world, does Fairey’s poster now serve as a warning and a reminder that it’s all just propaganda in the end? Is there still a place for political posters in 2017?
Now, Fairey has designed three new posters to coincide with the inauguration of president Donald Trump. The new posters form part of a series called “We the People: public art for the inauguration and beyond” created in collaboration with fellow artists Ernesto Yerena and Jessica Sabogal. The project was successful crowd-funded on Kickstarter, raising over a million dollars to print the posters as full page adverts in the Washington Post, as placards to be distributed for the inauguration, and as postcards to send to the new president.
On the surface, Fairey’s new posters look similar to the 2008 Hope image. However, though they retain the colours and Fairey’s signature stencil style, there are significant differences in content, message, and strategy. Choosing not to feature the incoming president as either hero or villain, the posters instead feature members of the public representing marginalised groups within society, to “create a series of images that capture the shared humanity of our diverse America.”
Considered together, the We the People posters represent a radical shift in Fairey’s approach to the political poster from 2008 to 2017. The central themes of Fairey’s art have always been propaganda and power. The Hope poster uses a conventional traditional propaganda approach, operating in the future tense, making promises which it has no power to keep, and as such now stands testament to the inevitable failure of such strategies. Unlike the Obama icon, whose distant gaze promises vague unspecified hope, the figures in the new posters do not make promises about the future. They know what they want now.
Over the text “We the People are greater than fear” a Muslim woman wearing a US flag hijab piercingly locks eyes with the viewer. By staring directly at the viewer, the poster becomes a personal confrontation and a direct challenge to consider what it means to be a member of the collective “we the people” of the American constitution and to uphold common values such as freedom from fear within this society. In another poster an African-American boy, in an inversion of Obama’s distant upwards dreaming pose, looks downwards to the left. He is not looking for a hero to save him. His eyes are not fixed on a vague dream of hope, but resolutely on the realities of living as a black American citizen today.
Since 2008 Fairey has learned and matured as a political communicator. By shifting the tense from future-imaginary to present-reality, and the power from the heroic politician to the individual citizen, his 2017 posters become more than propaganda. Beginning with their distribution at the Trump inauguration they have the potential to become, as the We the People project puts it “symbols of hope” offering a positive strategy to “disrupt the rising tide of hate and fear in America”. As Fairey said recently “we have Trump, so what’s the antidote? The antidote is not attacking Trump more.” These are protest posters which attack hate by refusing to attack, and in doing so offer new hope for the role and relevance of political art in Trump’s America.
This is a version of an article originally published on theconversation.com on the 19th of January 2017.
