Shepard Fairey Fights for "Hope"

Shepard Fairey's "Hope" poster of Barack Obama is already one of the most iconic images in campaign history; the original now hangs in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Everyone from Bill Maher to MAD magazine has parodied it; there's even an application that turns your Facebook profile photo into a Fairey–style image. "It was a genuine grass–roots thing," Fairey says. "It made a difference. That's what really made me happy."

Fairey came out of the East Coast skateboard–punk scene, and his often–provocative stickers and posters have been appearing on city streets for years. "He's a leader of street art," says curator Pedro Alonzo. "He's constantly playing with ideas of advertising and propaganda."

But now the 39–year–old is in the legal fight of his life. On February 6th, on his way to the premiere of a career retrospective in Boston, police stopped his taxi and arrested him on vandalism charges — some of which date back a decade.

"The vandal squad was watching my show because they thought it was terrible that someone like me was being put on a pedestal," says Fairey. He spent the night in jail and faces up to 87 years if convicted.

"I was having a great time until I got arrested in Boston, and I had the AP thing all within three days of each other," he says, sitting in his studio in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. "The AP thing" is a copyright battle with the Associated Press over his use of one of their photos as a starting point for the "Hope" poster. "This has nothing to do with what I did," says Fairey. "My image was so high–profile that they're using it as a way to say, 'Don't mess with our stuff or you're going to get sued.'"

Fairey is currently finishing a poster of Paul McCartney for a concert benefiting the David Lynch Foundation on Transcendental Meditation. The walls of his office are covered in original drawings by Raymond Pettibon and photographs of the Clash, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones.

The fight has taken its toll. "Lawsuits are the center of my world right now," he says. "I'm having trouble sleeping. But last year was amazing. I wouldn't take anything back."