The Date FarmersMarsea Goldberg of New Image Art gave these young artists their first show and tagged Carlos and Armando "the Date Farmers," since Armando's father owned a date farm in Coachella, California, and Carlos had worked there picking dates. Deep roots in the Mexican-American agricultural communities of Southern California have influenced their work, as have pop art and the work of Mexican artist Jose Guadalupe Posada. Their collages and paintings include found objects and elements of graffiti, Mexican street murals, revolutionary posters, sign painting, prison art, and tattoos. As part of the Upper Playground print series, Si Se Puede was released in a signed and numbered, limited-edition screen print of three hundred. |
David ChoeSouthern California fine artist David Choe created a painting entitled Hope, one of the most outstanding pieces of Obama campaign art. Also in the Upper Playground series, Choe's print, a signed-and-numbered limited-edition screen print of two hundred that sold out online within hours, has been widely seen as rivaling Shepard Fairey's iconic poster of the same name. Magazine covers for Giant Robot and Ambassador also widened his exposure. His wry sense of humor and a vocabulary dependent upon four-letter Anglo-Saxon derivatives create a funny, volatile mix. During the campaign, Choe and his brother James printed up some offset posters and set off in a van, pasting them up wherever and using them to create poster installations when possible. Choe's work was also a part of the Manifest Hope art shows in Denver and in Washington, D.C. |
Ray NolandFirst was designed by Ray Noland to commemorate Obama's November 4, 2008, election victory in a signed-and-numbered limited-edition screen print of 250. A black American had become president of the United States. For many people, this reality, the dream fulfilled, sank in very slowly. On victory night in Grant Park, when Obama spoke to the crowd, Noland was overcome with emotion. His incredible efforts and those of others had paid off. |
Ray NolandWith the printing of First, featuring Michelle Obama, Ray Noland produced a fine screen-print diptych in a signed-and-numbered limited edition of one hundred. First and first: America would have a black American woman as first lady. |
Julian NormanObama Is Money has proven a popular poster in a signed-and-numbered limited edition of one thousand. Given the amount of money that the Obama campaign raised, this poster has an unintended double meaning. |
David MacalusoDavid Macaluso dropped out of Parsons The New School for Design in 1994 to pursue other interests. He says that for years he did not even pick up a pencil to draw. Occasionally people knew of his abilities, and he would take a commission or draw something for a friend, but he hung back from a commitment to art-making, unconvinced of its worthiness. After all, what was there to express? Born to an artistic family that came from northern Italy in 2005, Macaluso eventually gave into his talent and returned to painting. In Color in the Mind's Eye—a signed-and-numbered limited-edition giclée print of 1,500—Macaluso captures a forward-looking, contemplative Obama in an oil rendering. |
Deroy PerazaDeroy Peraza was born in Havana, Cuba. His parents owned a typesetting company, and he grew up in the shop, covered with ink and surrounded by dingbats. After high school he attended Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. He founded his own design studio, Hyperakt, at the age of twenty-three. |
Brian CampbellFor a number of years, Brian Campbell has designed and manufactured campaign buttons in limited editions that have sold well and are valued by collectors. Reject Propaganda is his first venture into political poster art, and he was obviously influenced by Roy Lichtenstein and the 1960s Pop Artists. Campbell says he was moved to create a poster that was not simply a photograph manipulated in a computer graphic software package and did not look like a Shepard Fairey. He also says, "the cartoon image and the Obama image were painted with acrylic paint by hand." The run consists of one hundred signed-and-numbered glossy-finish giclée prints. |
BaskAlex Hostomsky, who goes by the nickname "Bask," moved to Florida with his parents from the Czech Republic. As a teenager he was especially interested in American advertising imagery and thought there was very little difference between the Communist propaganda of his childhood and the popular culture imagery that daily bombarded Americans. Deciding that he was being manipulated, even controlled, he looked carefully into advertising propaganda and discovered conspiracies. He began to paint the decay and the debris that is everywhere in cities and to deplore a consumer society devoid of meaning. The modern world eats its own tail. His signed-and-numbered limited-edition screen print of two hundred points to a limited, tentative progress that is as hopeful as Bask can be. |
Derek HessBorn into an artistic family (his dad was the head of the Industrial Design department at the Cleveland Institute of Art), the young Derek Hess imagined tanks and airplanes in his head. When his father got home from work, Hess would elaborate on his conceptions, and his father would draw them for him. This experience eventually led to an art career. He graduated from the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, majoring in printmaking. After college, Hess heavily into music, booked bands for the Euclid Tavern, and started to design and print the flyers. Soon he was producing posters for bands like Pink Floyd and Pearl Jam. His creations are now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Louvre. Currently he creates almost no posters, focusing instead on pen-and-ink drawings, acrylic paintings, and screen prints. |
Billi KidBorn in Columbia, Billi Kid resides in Darien, Connecticut, and works in New York City. In 1987 he received a BFA degree from Parsons The New School for Design. He maintains that he is determined to find his voice in the "oversaturated global and cyber landscapes." Since childhood he has been a doodler as well as an art lover and design enthusiast. His work, he says, "blurs the lines between graffiti, pop culture, and art." An innovative street artist immersed in "sticker culture," Billi Kid constructed eye-popping Obama sticker collages, often around Zoltron posters, in New York City and surrounding communities during the campaign. Kid also produced a number of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama screen prints, as well as using stencils to create spray-painted pieces on wood panels. This print is a signed edition. |
Thomas BrodahlA well-known web designer and computer artist who is greatly influenced by classical Bauhaus designs, Thomas Brodahl used red and green circles and triangles to form the letters under his Obama portraits. When he was ten years old, Brodahl moved from Bergen, Norway, to Luxembourg and graduated from the American International School in 1996. At the University of Virginia, he took a course in HTML 3, fell in love with web design, left the university, and returned to Luxembourg, where he started his own design studio. He founded the online design magazine Surfstation.lu, which proved very successful. In 2004 he moved to Los Angeles, partnered with Jessy Cinis, and started Stolen Inc. to produce a line of T-shirts. Like Barack Obama, he loves the game of basketball and plays as often as possible. |
EMEKBorn in Israel in 1970, Emek Golan and his family later immigrated to the United States. In the 1990s, he began creating rock concert posters. The Portland Oregonian maintains that Golan was a "savior of rock 'n' roll. Not the music, but the art." Golan discovered that one of Obama's favorite photos features Mohammed Ali knocking out George Foreman in the famous "rumble in the jungle" in Kinshasa, Zaire, October 30, 1974. The title of Golan's poster is Obama Bomaye, a play on the slogan chanted by thousands of jubilant Ali supporters, "Ali Bomaye," before, during, and after the match. In the African French dialect spoken in Zaire, "Obama Bomaye" means "Obama, kill him." Hillary Clinton watches from the lower left-hand corner of this special, signed-and-numbered limited-edition print. Golan would later add the image of Joe Biden to the right of Hillary, and that of George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Karl Rove in the lower right-hand corner. |
Steve FowlerSteve Fowler founded Gemini Studio Art with his twin brother Ryan in 1998. The twins grew up in Ohio, moved occasionally, and eventually settled in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. At first, Gemini turned out handmade greeting cards, but it since has expanded to include graphic design, commercial art, illustration, and photography. Yes We Can was printed in a signed-and-numbered limited edition of fifty. |
Guy JukeToday, Guy Juke's colorful posters are avidly sought by collectors. Early highlights include the handbills done for Butch Hancock and many others, but history aside, his more recent designs for Kinky Friedman's campaign for governor and his screen prints are at the top of any Juke collector's list. President Barack Obama, Stand with Me marks Obama's election victory, and this print is a signed-and-numbered limited-edition screen print. |
Alex RossAlex Ross was born into an artistic family in Lubbock, Texas. As a young man who loved to draw, he soon discovered Spider-Man, a colorful hero who defended the weak, took on the "bad guys," and protected the nation. When Ross discovered the photorealistic style of great illustrators like Andrew Loomis and Norman Rockwell, he set out to incorporate photorealism into comic books. At the American Academy of Art in Chicago, he studied classic illustrators like C. Leyendecker and was greatly influenced by the work of Salvador Dali. He also admires comic book artists George Perez and Berni Wrightson. As Ross progressed in his career, Kurt Busiak at Marvel Comics suggested a collaborative project that resulted in a graphic novel entitled Marvels—a panoply of superheroes. Soon after, Ross began painting tabloid-size books of Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman. Super Obama is a giclée, signed and numbered edition. |
HVW8Tyler Gibney and Gene Pendon founded Heavyweight Production House, Inc. ("HVW8") in 1998 in Montreal, Canada. An eclectic co-op typical of the worldwide urban art movement, Heavyweight mixed 1970s funk, 1980s New York graffiti, comic book art, and retro LP album covers and brought together DJs, filmmakers, and assorted musicians. Openings included art hanging on the wall, art being done on the floor, comic jams, music, film, dancing—a party. In the 1990s they created "composition pieces" around famous people they dubbed heavyweights like Miles Davis, Richard Pryor, Noam Chomsky, and Mies van der Rohe. Working with old newspapers, photographs, pop iconography, sketches, etc., the artists then free-styled (like jazz) to produce a composition that honored the chosen individual. In 2003 HVW8 moved to Los Angeles. Enthused by Obama's candidacy, HVW8 produced a four-color, signed-and-numbered limited-edition screen print entitled Hope, Change. |
Matt DyeInfluenced by a punk rock aesthetic, which appealed to a generation of disaffected young people looking to shock the world out of its slumber, Matt Dye's Obama prints can be outrageous and humorous in varying degrees, depending on the observer's own perspective. One of the best and quintessential examples of this artistic shock value is Obama Extended, which confronts the fears of an assassination head-on, at least mythically. A 007 Bond-like or Clint Eastwood-like Obama, a Superfly Obama, clinched cigarette in teeth, stands behind the image of a "pimped out" 1963 Kennedy assassination limousine pointing a huge gun at anyone foolish enough to attempt the evil deed. This screen print is a signed, open edition. |
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