88 Quotes by Shepard Fairey

The way I make art - the way a lot of people make art - is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important.

I consider myself a multi-platform artist - not just a street artist - but the audience I found through street art has created many of the opportunities I now have on other platforms.

When I made my Obey logo, it was 100 percent an homage to Barbara Kruger's work and 0 percent had anything to do with Supreme.

I've been making pieces dealing with environmental issues at least since 2004; I mean, I did stuff for the Sierra Club and the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge even back in the 1990s. But somewhere a little after 2004, Hummer hits me up. I'm like, 'Are you kidding me?'

I do think that copyrights and intellectual property are important - it's important to be able to keep people from making verbatim copies of a particular creation that could somehow hurt the creator.

If I spend time conceiving and making a piece of art, and somebody else sees that it has market value and replicates it in order to steal part of my market, then that's not cool.

In the case of the Obama poster, I was just exercising my First Amendment rights - and my free speech is exercised visually. People who want to talk or write in order to share an opinion about Obama can do that, but when I want to say what I think about him, I need to make a portrait.

I never set out to be a groundbreaking artist in the sense of doing something that's never been done before. I set out to make stuff that communicated quickly and effectively, playing off of advertising, pop art, and pop culture.

One of the reasons I started my clothing line was because I went into an Urban Outfitters, and they were bootlegging my star logo on T-shirts.