Cultural acclaim, residents' anger Artist's arrest points to a Boston divide

The Boston Globe
Cultural acclaim, residents' anger
Artist's arrest points to a Boston divide

By Maria Cramer and John R. Ellement
Globe Staff / February 10, 2009

While renowned artist Shepard Fairey was being feted around Boston in recent weeks, posing for pictures with Mayor Thomas M. Menino and preparing for his big opening night at the ICA, neighborhood groups around the city were seething.

In the days leading up to Friday night's opening, Boston Detective Bill Kelley said, he was getting more and more complaints from residents of the Back Bay, the North End, and Mission Hill, furious that a man who admitted to spreading graffiti - even bragged about it - was being treated like a celebrity instead of a criminal.

On Friday night, Kelley ended a stakeout by pulling Fairey's taxicab to the side of a Boston street and arresting him on an outstanding warrant on an old graffiti charge from 2000 as the artist was on his way to the Institute of Contemporary Art in South Boston.

The arrest and its timing, combined with Fairey's rise from counterculture icon to mainstream celebrity, have exposed anew some of Boston's oldest contradictions - between convention and revolution, between propriety and creativity, between the old order of places like the Back Bay and the new-moneyed donors to the ICA.

In its wake, it has left two unanswered questions: What is crime and what is art?

"At the end of the day . . . he was arrested like any other graffiti vandal," Kelley said in a telephone interview.

Fairey, who at 38 has become prominent for his "Hope" image of President Obama, spent most of yesterday shuttling between courthouses in Brighton and Boston, responding to the outstanding warrant from 2000 and charges that he had posted one of his trademark images on Massachusetts Turnpike Authority property at Massachusetts Avenue and Newbury Street on or about Jan. 24. An affidavit filed in court accuses Fairey of committing at least five additional acts of vandalism over the past several years. Kelley, who has been investigating graffiti-related crimes since 1997, said at least two of them occurred within the past two weeks.

The charges carry a maximum sentence of two years in a county correctional facility, fines, and loss of a driver's license for a year.

Since his black and white "Obey Giant" stencils - based on images of professional wrestler Andre the Giant - began appearing on buildings and overpasses around the country about two decades ago, Fairey's work has often brought him in conflict with the law. He told the Globe recently that he has been arrested 14 times. In recent months, however, the artist has achieved a more mainstream type of fame, with his "Hope" image now displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, and his work featured in a six-month exhibit at the ICA.
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