Saturday 4 February 21.00 – 22.00 (9.00 pm – midnight)
Dallas Contemporary has invited Los Angeles based street artist SHEPARD FAIREY to create more than 12 murals throughout the city with a focus on West Dallas. Known for his iconic designed President Obama HOPE poster, Fairey has worked as an artist creating works on the streets and globally in public spaces using posters, stickers, wheat paste and painted murals.
In celebration of the mural project, Dallas Contemporary will host the first annual PHENOMENON, an over-the-top, neon-inspired dance party. Fairey, a world-toured DJ, will provide the music for guests in the Dallas Contemporary galleries, just days after completing his murals.
The last time Shep showed up to DJ a party kicking off one of his exhibitions (here in Boston at the ICA), he was hand-cuffed and dragged off to jail. Apparently the uptight cops didn’t take kindly to his putting up his OBEY tags all across town, though I still can see several on my drive down Storrow Drive every morning to drop my kids off at school.
That turned out to be only the beginning of his problems as his most famous image, of then candidate Obama, turned out to be originally from an AP photograph that Shep never credited and at first denied using as the basis for his “HOPE” poster.
To his great credit he came to our GMP event in LA shortly after being called out for the mistake he made surrounding the HOPE image and talked very directly about what it means to be a man and to make a mistake. The video of that is below.
