SHEPARD FAIREY

(1970, South Carolina, US)

Frank Shepard Fairey is an American contemporary street artist, graphic designer, activist and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene. He first became known for his "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" (…OBEY…) sticker campaign while attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), which appropriated images from the comedic supermarket tabloid Weekly World News.

Fairey's first art museum exhibition, entitled Supply & Demand (as was his earlier book), was held in Boston at the Institute of Contemporary Art during the summer of 2009. The exhibition featured more than 250 works in a wide variety of media: screen prints, stencils, stickers, rubylith illustrations, collages, and works on wood, metal and canvas.

As a complement to the ICA exhibition, Fairey created public art works around Boston. The artist explains his driving motivation: "The real message behind most of my work is 'question everything'."

In July of 2015, Fairey was arrested and detained at Los Angeles International Airport, after passing through customs, on a warrant for allegedly vandalizing 14 buildings in Detroit. He subsequently turned himself in to Detroit Police.

Watch this video of OBEY:

SANER

(Mexico City)

Edgar “Saner” Flores is an urban artist, illustrator and graphic designer. Raised by his parents in Mexico City and surrounded by rich color and tradition, Saner developed an interest in drawing and Mexican muralism early on. He began expressing himself on paper and through graffiti art, later going on to earn a degree in graphic design from the Universidad Autónoma de México. His creations are influenced by Mexican custom and folklore, color, mysticism, masks and skulls. A mix of these lifelong interests and passions has led him to become the artist he is today.

Saner’s work has been featured in galleries in Mexico, the United States, London, Berlin and Barcelona. He has collaborated with Kidrobot, Vans, G-Shock, HQTR Canada, Pineda Covalin, Persigna Store, Bacardi, Adidas México, Televisa, and many others.

Watch Saner give a tour of Mexico City and talk about other muralists by MOCA:

LUCIANO DURAN

(Kansas, US)

A graphic designer by trade, the well-traveled and always mysterious Duran was born in Kansas, raised in Mexico, and spent time living in Japan before landing at the California College of Arts in San Francisco in 1995, but if you ask him where he’s from, he won’t hesitate to tell you, “Planet Dyatron”. 

In 1983, he got his start spinning records for teenagers at his uncle’s club in Mexico, and has now been on the scene in California for over a decade blowing people’s minds with his massive, rare collection of electronic vinyl, and his equally extensive and arguably outrageous, eclectic cache of vintage eyewear.  He spins with Miami bass champions Soundchasers, has played with Tokyo’s AE35 and Dutch electro’s Legowelt & TLR, and this summer, he will be opening for minimal wave heroes Xeno & Oaklander in Los Angeles before heading back to perform in Japan later this year.

KORALIE

(1977, Montpellier, France)

Koralie belongs to a new generation of boundary-breaking French artists that has emerged since the turn of the millennium and is now carving its mark on the global scene of street art.

Koralie—originally spelt with a “c”—did not plan to become a street artist. She graduated with a degree in architecture and worked for advertising agencies. But when she moved to Toulouse, in southwest France, graffiti was part of the local landscape and she began mingling with emerging street artists. “They told me: ‘You paint on canvas. You should paint on walls.’” At 22, she traded the canvas for the wall. “I used to think that street art was a lack of modesty: Why should I force people to see my art? Who am I to do that?” she recalls. “But then I thought: Architects do the same thing. They create buildings without asking anyone.”

She went on to become one of the most promising artists of her generation, also dabbling in graphic design and recently creating a highly prized Dunny, an action figure made of soft, smooth vinyl released last year. Her work has been seen on the streets and galleries of Tokyo, Paris, Rome, Munich, Barcelona, San Diego, and San Francisco to name a few. In New York, her work is showcased at the Joshua Liner Gallery in Manhattan. She has collaborated on numerous projects with clothing brands like Billabong, Etnies, Upper Playground, and Carhartt, In addition she has done illustrations for magazines and CD covers.

Watch this video of Koraline and Supakitch:

KMNDZ

(Los Angeles, US)

KMNDZ, aka Johnny Rodriguez, is a Los Angeles artist who paints weatherbeaten, suffering steampunk robots and mysterious mechanical devices with street-art style and masterly technique.

A successful leader in the graphic design community, this Los Angeles based artist, has worked for some of the world’s premier design agencies and top entertainment companies. With brands like MTV Networks, Universal Pictures, Microsoft, Lexus, Disney, and Activision populating his resume, Johnny has built an impressive portfolio of both artistic and technological accomplishments in the world of graphic design and new-media. However, first and foremost, Johnny is an artist. He attributes his success in commercial design as a direct result of his passion for art. KMDNZ is about both the past and the future.

Rodriguez’s personal work is quite different from his commercial endeavors. When he sits down to paint, he puts aside the pressures of mass appeal and commercial accessibility, and instead focuses on creating art for himself. Drawing from his own life, his paintings are filled with memories of family and friends, religious undertones, and iconic elements. A recent piece features a drawing of an audio cassette embedded into a hand grenade. This represents a tough look back at the time when his father left their family to fight a war in Nicaragua, and left only an audio recording to explain his actions. 

Watch Johnny painting in his studio:

HENRY LEWIS

Henry Lewis is a San Francisco-based painter/tattooer/graphic designer. In his studio is where Henry sits and paints and smokes cigarette after cigarette, ostensibly for hours and hours every single night, after he leaves Everlasting Tattoo.  

Henry'’s been working almost exclusively in oils over the past year, and has become incredibly adept with the medium. There’s something about oil paint that you can’t get with any other paint; it has to do with luminosity. The layers all build on each other and when handled with some skill, the canvas fairly glows. It’s also a very subtle medium and difficult to master. 

CODY HUDSON

(1971, Wisconsin, US)

Cody Hudson works as a multimedia artist, but is often considered a painter and a graphic designer. His use of graphic line work and a palette of bright colors have coalesced to create a body of paintings that reference his narrative of longing and hopefulness while also finding context within contemporary abstract painting. 

The artist is interested in the elemental use of shape as signifier, but he has gone further by allowing the forms that take place in his paintings to be direct extensions of the poetic content of the painting itself. He has also focused on sculpture and text, introducing found and constructed wood forms, color and graphic images to his totemic structures. Ranging from tabletop constructions to large freestanding pieces, his three dimensional work has become a major focal point of his process as a whole.

Watch a video by Vans: