Shepard Fairey is an American artist who gained national prominence in 2008 with his famous “HOPE” poster of Barack Obama, which played an important role in the Presidential campaign.

Born in 1970, Fairey graduated from the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1992 with a B.F.A. in Illustration. While attending RISD, Fairey worked in a local skateboarding shop, where he stenciled punk T-shirts. There, Fairey nurtured a sense of rebelliousness and subversion of authority in his work.

Indeed, Fairey achieved his first taste of publicity when he was arrested for a practice called wheat pasting, in which an artist displays his work on public property using an ad...hesive mixture of water and wheat. Aside from these arrests, Fairey is no stranger to legal trouble. In 2009, the Associated Press sued him for basing his “HOPE” poster on one of their photos of Obama. Fairey argued fair use.