The path to artistic super-stardom lies as such: commence career as a typical street art vandal, create a revolutionary art campaign that rocks the world, continue to produce groundbreaking work for 20 years under the radar, then design one of the most iconic images of the decade, and blow up. On the 20th anniversary of Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant campaign, a collaboration with longtime sponsor Levi Strauss & Co. has finally brought the launch of Fairey’s first ever museum exhibit, Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

The exhibit, which runs through August 16th, features over 200 works, including Fairey’s redesigned covers of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, in addition to stickers, stencils, collages and his famous screens. The 7-themed exhibit which unapologetically blurs the line between street art and fine art, covers Fairey’s favorite socio-political topics including; “War in Iraq”, “Music” and “Portraiture” --a room full of dynamic individuals, starring yours truly, Barack Obama. After 20 years of dodging cops and making his art a staple in any city worth vandalizing, the current legal run-in with the AP over copyright infringement of the Obama image is just another obstacle to overcome on his lengthy road to success. Fairey’s museum debut was important enough to make him appear in a full suit to showcase his work. “They told me I had to wear a suit on one of these days,” he said. Fair Enough.

You started out doing street art. Did you hope that you would eventually end up in a museum, or was it something you wanted to avoid in order to maintain the accessibility you’re so notorious for? No, I’m still doing street art. I was doing street art this week. I’ll put it this way: I have more stuff up than any graffiti writer in Boston right now, and I have a museum show. So I’m not trying to brag, I’m just putting it in perspective. You can do it all if you really want, and you can do it well if you want to. For me, my art was always about reaching as many people as possible with the concept of cross-pollination, getting people to think about things from a perspective that they hadn’t before. It’s so museum goers who say, “Wow, hey, I heard street art was all vandals who do garbage,” can say, “Well this is actually some graphically sound work, maybe I should play closer attention to the work in the street.” Conversely, I’m sure that there are a lot of people from the streets who are like, “Screw the elitist institutions man.” But they’ll see hey, they were willing to make a very beautiful showcase of this work, let me check out some of the other stuff that they’ve done. So whether it’s a commercial project, museums, the street, a T-shirt, I’m trying to just reach people through as many different mediums as possible. Street art is always going to be an important component of what I do because it’s free and completely accessible. It’s not even an inexpensive product, it’s free. And I think that in our capitalist society, it’s very rare to be able to enjoy something without any sort of barriers, although some people would rather enjoy the lack of my work!

Political events really fuel your art, so now that Obama has won, what do you think your art is going to be like in the coming year. What is Obama going to give to you? A stimulus check, right? I’m actually really curious to see how things go from here on in. It is going to affect my work, but there are certain issues that will be ongoing in my work, certain concerns that are ongoing. I’m really worried about global warming and the environment and I’d like to see the government--not only corporations, but also the government itself--try to invest in green technology. So I’m going to be focusing some energy on that, because I think that it's always important to maintain a critical eye. But I also don’t want to undermine any unity that it’s going to require for progress, because I do think that people need to put petty differences aside, because we went really far backward the last eight years. So I think I’m just going to analyze every situation as it comes my way and decide how I should best approach it in my art. That’s what I’ve always done my whole life.