Shepard Fairey took the exact words federal officials used to describe protesters and printed them across portraits of the officers doing the arresting.
Four labels, one riot shield
The series is called "Projection Mirror." It's four screen prints, each showing an ICE officer in riot gear holding a baton, stamped with a different phrase: "paid agitator," "domestic terrorist," "intent to massacre," "worst of the worst." Fairey pulled the language directly from statements Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House aide Stephen Miller made about protesters and immigrants.
The title carries the argument. Fairey isn't coining an insult. He's taking rhetoric aimed at demonstrators and stamping it onto the agency doing the detaining, so the same accusation lands back on whoever is making it.
Where the money goes
Each print measures 24 by 18 inches, screened on 80-pound cream Speckletone paper, signed by Fairey, in an edition of 300. A portion of the proceeds benefits CHIRLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, one of the older immigrant advocacy groups working out of Los Angeles. Fairey has built three decades of practice around this exact model: limited print run, blunt political message, direct line from stencil-ready image to a cause that needs the funding.
This isn't a new fight for him
Fairey walked through the reasoning on Democracy Now in April, telling host Amy Goodman that authoritarian drift "can happen here, and it is." The interview took place in his Los Angeles studio, timed to the theatrical release of Steal This Story, Please!, a documentary about Goodman and Democracy Now for which Fairey designed the poster.
He's also the artist TIME chose for its cover marking the United States' 250th anniversary, reworking Lady Liberty in his own graphic style. It's TIME's fourth Fairey cover, following Person of the Year: Barack Obama in 2008 and The Protester in 2011. Whatever the moment, the magazine keeps handing him the same job: reduce it to one image people recognize on sight.
New Mexico gets two new walls
Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe opens Fairey's first solo New Mexico exhibition, "Cultivate Justice," on July 17, running through August 10, with an opening reception from 4 to 6 p.m. The show brings original pieces and multimedia work to the US for the first time after a run through European museums, alongside prints on paper. Alongside the gallery show, Fairey is painting two murals across the Santa Fe and Albuquerque area, putting permanent street-level work in a state that hasn't had one of his walls before.
Same format, new target
Fairey built his name on the Obey Giant sticker campaign and the Obama Hope poster, both running on the same stencil-and-repeat logic that made street art scalable in the first place: cut one image, reproduce it everywhere. Two decades later the logic hasn't changed. Projection Mirror isn't a break from that stencil practice, it's the same repeatable, wheatpaste-ready format pointed at a new target, built on the same bet that made Obey work the first time: one strong image, multiplied until it can't be ignored.
0 comments