Shepard Fairey/Obey + Alfredo Gonzalez/Dofre 'Make Art Not War' (Cream) Print Release Details

Artist: Shepard Fairey/Obey + Alfredo Gonzalez
Title: Make Art Not War (Cream)
Medium: Handpulled Multi Color Screen Print
Size: 18 x 24 Inches
Edition: 150
Prices: $120

 

*available at 1pm EST on Thursday November 6th, 2025

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Frank Shepard Fairey, born 15 February 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina, is the creative force behind the global OBEY movement. While studying illustration at Rhode Island School of Design he launched the 1989 sticker campaign André the Giant Has a Posse, transforming a grainy newspaper photo of the wrestler into a stark black-and-white icon accompanied only by the command “OBEY”. The project was never about the man; it was an experiment in viral psychology, testing how a meaningless image could propagate through skate parks, city walls and college dorms once it looked official and appeared everywhere. Fairey’s answer came quickly: the sticker multiplied, becoming one of the most ubiquitous street images of the 1990s and laying the groundwork for his clothing label OBEY Clothing (est. 2001) and design agency Studio Number One (2003).

Fairey’s style marries the visual punch of propaganda posters with the immediacy of DIY print culture. Hand-cut stencils, bold blocks of red, white and black, and crisp vector lines deliver messages that are easy to read from a moving bus yet rich in layered meaning. He cites Soviet constructivism, 1980s skateboard graphics and punk flyers as equal influences, and his philosophy is simple: “question everything”. That ethos turned political in 2008 when he created the HOPE portrait of then-senator Barack Obama, a screen-print that fused his signature palette with a forward-gazing gaze and the single word “HOPE”. The image became the unofficial emblem of Obama’s presidential campaign, praised by The New Yorker as the most efficacious American political illustration since Uncle Sam Wants You.

Since then Fairey has focused on issues rather than personalities, tackling climate change, campaign-finance reform, gun violence and human rights through posters, murals and limited-edition prints. His process remains hands-on: he cuts stencils by hand, pulls his own screens and pastes works on walls from Los Angeles to Lisbon, insisting that reproducibility keeps art democratic. Institutions including MoMA, the Smithsonian and London’s V&A have acquired his prints, yet he continues to paste illegally, proving that museum validation has not dulled his subversive edge.

Today Fairey lives and works in Los Angeles, producing monumental murals, album covers and clothing graphics that continue to blur the boundary between fine art, commerce and activism. Whether painting a five-storey portrait of a voting rights activist or releasing a run of anti-NRA stickers, he treats every surface as public space for civic dialogue, demonstrating that ink on paper can still shift consciousness and, occasionally, history itself.

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Alfredo Gonzalez, who signs his work Dofre, is an Oxnard-based contemporary artist represented by Sugar Press Art. Born with graffiti roots, he merges traditional oil painting with bold, deconstructed portraiture to create what critics call “disrupted realism”. Using brushes, palette knives and aerosol, he builds fractured faces where eyes, mouths and hands float across raw linen, suggesting emotional dislocation rather than physical likeness.

His palette balances classical ochres with neon sprays, allowing thick impasto to collide with transparent glazes so the surface flickers between old master depth and street art immediacy. Recent series such as Aún Así layer metallic gold over asphalt black, then scratch away sections to reveal under-painting, a technique that mirrors the way memory erodes and reforms. Each limited edition is hand embellished, ensuring no two prints are identical.

Gonzalez exhibits widely, from Grand Bohemian Gallery group shows to online drops that sell out within hours. Through every ruptured portrait he offers a single message: identity is never fixed, but always in flux, painted and repainted by experience, culture and the city that raised him.