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RISD ‘92 [Illustration]
Now best known as the man who designed the official Obama poster.

Over a decade after it all began at RISD, the Andre the Giant street campaign (www.obeygiant.com) is still going strong thanks to Shepard Fairey, the mastermind behind this populist “experiment in phenomenology.” More than one million stickers, 15,000 posters and countless spray paint stencils have been put up throughout the world, making the Giant project one of the most ambitious art campaigns ever. The icon has surfaced in exhibitions, on mainstream TV shows (Homicide, Law and Order and Veronica’s Closet), in commercial films (Batman Forever, The Devil’s Own and 8mm) and in the offbeat documentary Andre the Giant has a Posse by RISD filmmaker Helen Stickler ’91. Through his company Black Market in San Diego, Fairey also conducts “guerrilla marketing on a corporate scale” for giants such as GTE, Hasbro, Netscape, NBC and Pepsi.