Shepard Fairey, the street artist who turned a portrait of Barack Obama into one of the defining images of the 2008 presidential campaign, opened his first solo exhibition in Atlanta on October 24. The show, titled “NEW DAY RISING,” fills ABV Gallery in East Atlanta Village with works spanning paintings, prints and mixed-media pieces, and it remains on view through January 3, 2027.
According to ABV Gallery, the exhibition presents more than 150 works exploring Fairey’s signature imagery and cultural commentary, while ArtsATL describes the show as featuring 180 works bringing together paintings, prints, mixed-media pieces and other explorations. The gallery itself sits in East Atlanta Village and was founded in 2009, giving Fairey’s debut Atlanta show a hometown-adjacent backdrop even as his career has stretched from street corners to museum walls.
A Career Built on Posters and Protest
Fairey rose to prominence in the early 1990s through his “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” campaign, the gallery notes, before his work eventually found its way into the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. His 2008 “Hope” campaign poster of Obama remains his most widely recognized image, and the gallery notes that his pieces have since sold for six figures at auction. ArtsATL notes that Fairey’s parents attended college in Atlanta and that his career has skateboarding-industry connections through professional skateboarder Andy Howell.
The portraits filling the Atlanta show lean heavily into that activist throughline. Per ArtsATL’s report, the exhibition includes images of civil rights leaders John Lewis and Malcolm X, activist Angela Davis, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, artist Ai Weiwei and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai. Turner Carroll Gallery, which presented Fairey’s New Mexico solo exhibition, notes that he frequently confronts issues of human rights, equality and authority in his art — a description that tracks closely with the faces chosen for the Atlanta walls.
A Planned Mural in Sweet Auburn
Beyond the gallery walls, Fairey has plans for a Coretta Scott King mural at Sweet Auburn Grande, located at 229 Auburn Ave. NE in Atlanta’s historic Sweet Auburn district, according to ArtsATL’s reporting. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes the planned piece as a tribute to the neighborhood’s history of activism, placing it alongside the gallery show as part of Fairey’s broader Atlanta debut.
Pairing a gallery exhibition with a public mural fits a pattern Fairey has followed elsewhere this year. In New Mexico this past summer, he opened a solo show at Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe — referred to as “Cultivate Justice” by the Santa Fe New Mexican and as “Cultivating Justice” by KUNM — while also completing murals in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The Santa Fe exhibition included 89 pieces spanning his career, and the gallery sold 16 of them on opening night alone, the New Mexican reported.
How the New Mexico Run Compares
That New Mexico opening drew roughly 500 people, according to gallery owner Carroll, who described the scene to the New Mexican as a “frenzy.” Fairey also painted the “Rising Above Mosaic” mural at the Santa Fe Art Institute, a piece standing more than 40 feet tall and bearing the words “rise above,” and he was scheduled to unveil another mural at Albuquerque’s Barelas Rail Yards that same summer, per KUNM’s account.
ABV Gallery, which works with a global network of more than 600 contemporary artists, is betting that Fairey’s Atlanta debut can generate similar energy in a city with its own deep well of civil rights history. With “NEW DAY RISING” on view through the new year, East Atlanta Village now holds its own chapter in the traveling story of an artist who has spent three decades turning posters, stencils and murals into statements about power, protest and hope.
