Andre the Giant Has a Posse

Andre the Giant Has a Posse is a street art campaign based on a design by Frank Shepard Fairey created in 1986 in Charleston, South Carolina. Distributed by the skater community, the Andre stickers began showing up in nearly every big city across the U.S.A. Later, when Fairey was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), he released his manifesto. At the time Fairey declared the campaign to be "an experiment in phenomenology." Over time the artwork has been reused in a number of ways and has become a world-wide movement, following in the footsteps of Ivan Stang's Church of the SubGenius and World War II icon "Kilroy Was Here". At the same time, Fairey's work has evolved stylistically and semantically into the OBEY Giant campaign.

History

Fairey and campaign co-author Ryan Lesser, along with Blaize Blouin, Alfred Hawkins, and Mike Mongo Nicholl, created paper and vinyl stickers and posters with an image of the wrestler André the Giant and the text "ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE 7' 4", 520lb", as an in-joke directed at hip hop and skater subculture, and then began clandestinely (and somewhat fanatically) propagating and posting them in Providence, Rhode Island and the Eastern United States.

By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of paper and then vinyl stickers were photocopied and hand-silkscreened and put in visible places throughout the world, primarily in culturally influential urban settings in the United States, such as Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco, but also in places which travellers often visited such as Greece, London, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, and the Caribbean Islands. In effect, Fairey and associates were creating a 'posse' of a wide audience of those who were in on the joke and willing to spread the message, and those who were not but found the original image compelling.

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