One of Shepard Fairey’s original Obama “HOPE” collages just sold for $735,000
Fairey made three original mixed-media stenciled collages
One of the original collages Shepard Fairey made of his “HOPE” portrait of then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in 2008 just sold at auction.
The work sold for $735,000, per Heritage Auction, well above their $300,000-$500,000 pre-auction estimate. Fairey made three original mixed-media stenciled collages, one of which is in the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery and now on view while Kehinde Wiley’s 2018 portrait of Obama is on tour. The other is in a private collection, according to Heritage Auction.
Fairey, a street artist and founder of OBEY clothing, put the portrait out as a street art poster ahead of the 2008 Iowa caucus, which Obama won. More than 300,000 posters were distributed, and Fairey later designed versions for the 2009 Inauguration and TIME magazine. A copyright lawsuit between Fairey and the Associated Press over the image was settled in 2011.
“HOPE” “defined an entire movement and a presidency,” Heritage Auctions director of modern and contemporary art Taylor Curry said in a statement.
“I can't overstate how important the image is, and bidders responded accordingly,” Curry said.
When I interviewed Fairey in 2017, he told me he didn’t want to try to make another “HOPE.”
“I am not as interested in making portraits of people that maybe play into the idea of image and celebrity as the important thing when I actually think substance is,” he said.