Shepard Fairey And Blek Le Rat's Art Project Analysis

I knew I wanted to do a product since I started this project, but I wasn’t sure how to incorporate it into my paper. Originally, I wanted to look at two different cities with a lot of street art, and create my pieces based off of a common theme or message in the city’s art. However, that idea didn’t have any clear style attached to it, and I thought it might be too broad. So, I ended up deciding to examine two different artists, Shepard Fairey and Blek le Rat. I wanted to create two pieces based on the styles they are known for. Fairly has more political messages in his art, and as author Antonio D’Ambrosio mentioned, Fairey’s early art “questioned the unopposed supremacy of the powerful” (32). On the other hand, Blek le Rat’s art was created
I knew this would definitely have to be a stencil. There are a lot of different materials that can be used to create stencils, but I decided I wanted to use a sheet of acetate so that it would last longer. An acetate sheet is like a very thin plastic, thin enough to cut through with an Xacto knife. However, acetate is more expensive, and when I talked to Cedric Umoja he suggested packing paper. Packing paper wouldn’t be reusable, but it would get the job done. Instead of putting spraying my stencil onto a wall, I decided to use a piece of board from my garage because it had a lot of character and old paint on it. It gave the illusion of something older and not so pristine (much like a city wall), so I chose that for my stencil. Blek le Rat usually has all black pieces, sometimes with an accent color, so I decided I would do the same. To make the theme of my second piece more political than social, I had to pick a topic that I felt strongly about. The topic of my piece is a combination of women’s and LGBT rights, depicting two girls kissing, one wearing the pink hat picked up by feminists involved in the Women’s March in 2017. One problem I came across in the early sketches was that one girl, with shorter hair, looked a bit more like a boy. So to make it absolutely clear, I put a rainbow flag painting on her cheek, and a bisexual flag on the other girl. Stencils work best with spray paint, but the flags are more specific, so I wanted to do them in acrylic. The two flags on each girl’s cheek will include the accent colors like the ones often seen in Blek le Rat pieces. These two issues are very important to me, as a feminist, and as someone who has friends and family in the LGBT