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Women and Welty

Museum And Gallery

Radical chic

PROVOCATEUR: Fairey’s root formula is the classic pulp combo of bad-ass guys and sexy gals.

Fairey is one of the most famed street artists (the refined term for people who do what used to be known as graffiti) in the world. His work seems to be everywhere these days — and it actually is in the case of the iconic red-white-and-blue Barack Obama “Hope” poster that he produced this spring. The 38-year-old Los Angeles artist first gained notice nearly two decades ago as a student at Rhode Island School of Design when he began (illegally) plastering Providence — and then the world — with stickers featuring the wrestler (and actor in the 1987 film The Princess Bride) André the Giant. Later versions were amended with the word “Obey.”

“I realized that getting people to question all the imagery they’re inundated with daily,” Fairey says, “was something that was actually somewhat important to, I think, the way people communicate, and the way people can either question the use of public space or just passively submit. So then that’s why the idea of making an image that confronted people with the idea of obedience.”

Fairey is in Boston to check in with the Institute of Contemporary Art, which is scheduled to present his first solo museum show in February. “It’s now been almost 20 years that I’ve been doing street art, and using street art both as a way to showcase my art and put my politics across and I guess bypass the bureaucracy of the gallery system. Now I’ve been embraced by the gallery system, but it wasn’t because I pandered to the gallery system. It was because the gallery system relies on supply and demand, and I created a demand for my work by doing street art.”

While he’s in town, the ICA has lined up officially approved spaces for him to poster: a Montgomery Street fence in Boston’s South End; the International Bicycle Center in Allston; the boutique Grand in Somerville’s Union Square; the graffiti wall around the corner from Central Kitchen in Cambridge’s Central Square. I meet Fairey’s crew at a red brick wall outside the Gap at 15 Brattle Street, which the Harvard Square Business Association has helped arrange permission for them to poster. Fairey is dressed in blue jeans, Adidas sneakers, and a black hoodie that he removes to reveal a black T-shirt bearing the slogan “Bone: thugs-n-typography.” He has shaggy graying brown hair and a raffish scar running up his left brow.