Shepard Fairey was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1970. He is a contemporary street artist, graphic designer, activist and founder of OBEY Clothing and creative agency Studio Number One. In 1989, while at Rhode Island School of Design, Fairey created the ‘Andre the Giant has a Posse’ sticker that later evolved into the OBEY GIANT art campaign. In 2008, his portrait of then-Democratic candidate Barack Obama became an internationally recognised emblem of hope. He is known for the ‘We The People’ campaign debuted during the 2017 Women’s Marches worldwide. Fairey has painted nearly 140 public murals, becoming one of the most sought-after and provocative artists globally, changing the way people converse about art and view the urban landscape.Damien Hirst was born in Bristol in 1965, and grew up in Leeds. He moved to London in 1984 and studied fine art at Goldsmiths college from 1986 to 1989. Hirst was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995. Since 1987, over 100 solo Damien Hirst exhibitions have taken place worldwide and his work has been included in over 300 group shows. In 2012, Tate Modern, London, presented a major retrospective survey of Hirst’s work in conjunction with the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. In April 2017, he presented his most complex project to date, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, across two museum spaces in Venice.Invader was born in Paris in 1969. He uses his now ubiquitous pixelated characters to unpretentiously bring art to the masses. Self-described as an Unidentified Free Artist (UFA) whose identity is perennially hidden behind masks and digital pixelations, his pseudonym reflects his artistic practice – to invade (often illegally) spaces with viral art since 1998. The nearly ninety territories he has invaded include the International Space Station, the seabed off the coast of Cancún and a remote city located at an altitude of 4000 metres above sea level where he had installed his 4000th mosaic in 2021. The discovery of a mosaic by Invader has become akin to an international treasure hunt for the 482,000 players of FlashInvaders, the free app he has developed. In a span of thirty years, Invader has expanded his practice into new media, delving into Rubik’s cube sculptures in his Rubikcubist series, produced installations, films and acclaimed exhibitions in galleries and museums worldwide. Sean Bonner is a curator, writer, and street photographer. He co-edited/authored Phaidon’s CRYPTOPUNKS: Free to Claim and wrote the introduction for Rizzoli’s Covert to Overt: The Under/Overground Art of Shepard Fairey. His photo books include Unfinished Projects (2024) and Don’t Go Outside (2017). He co-founded the Los Angeles gallery sixspace and was a curator-in-residence at Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier.Iwona Blazwick OBE is chair of the Royal Commission for AlUla’s Public Art Expert Panel in Saudi Arabia. Prior to that she had been Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London since 2001. She gave many emerging artists their first solo shows including, Peter Doig, Damien Hirst, Barbara Kruger, Cristina Iglesias, Julian Opie, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Fiona Ray.James Fox is a London-based journalist, born in Washington D.C., and a former feature writer and foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times. He is the author of White Mischief and The Langhorne Sisters, and co-author of Life, the best-selling memoir of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. He has also contributed to various publications, including Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, London Review of Books and Air Mail, among others.
