(born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1970)
St. Margherita Square, 2009, mixed media ( stencil, silkscreen and painted printed paper collage) on panel, 210 x 350 cm

Provenance:
Spazio Giglio Arte, Milan
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Milan, Spazio Giglio Arte, Shepard Fairey. Passaggio in Italia,
7 November – 7 December 2012
Naples, PAN – Palazzo delle Arti di Napoli, Shepard Fairey # Obey,
6 December – 28 Februray 2015, exh. cat. pp. 46-47 with ill.

Infused with the synthetical power of 20th century phenomenological philosophy, Shepard Fairey’s monumental St. Margherita Square tells the story of a Roman Catholic martyr viewed in terms of modern political subversion. The location that the title of this piece recalls is found in Venice: Campo Santa Margherita, situated within the district of Dorsoduro, has since the 1800s been a symbol of the themes that Fairey undertakes in this composition. Dorsoduro was for an extensive period inhabited especially by female workers, and consistently represented a space for socialist activity. In the Campo rests the infamous Scuola dei Varoteri—itself holding memories of labor cycles and radical economics—with an entrance adorned by a saint-like woman in sculptural relief. She wears a mandorla, echoing Fairey’s floral pattern that similarly covers the chest of his central St. Margherita figure, surrounding his signature Obey face. Connected to Saint Margaret of Antioch herself on his own surface, Fairey hence builds a resonating diagram for the ideas of societal consciousness rooted in his personal manifesto and in Obey. Still the relationship of Saint Margaret to Venice that illustrates Fairey’s piece has expanded beyond Dorsoduro. Titian, the champion artist of the city, created a portrait of the religious subject near 1565, that drew from Genoese Jacobus da Varagine’s 1275 Golden Legend detailing her life.

Da Varagine described Margaret rejecting the provost Olybrius in favor of her love for Christ, then finding herself successfully fighting engulfment in the mouth of a dragon, demonstrating agency that Titian captured in paint. Equal zealous triumph over male assertiveness rests in the repeated graphic portraits beside Fairey’s principal character. The likeness of Black Panther leader and feminist authority Angela Davis, for example, appears in a sequence of three juxtaposing his imagined Margaret. Davis, a constant inspiration for Fairey, in her scholarship has mirrored qualities of da Varagine’s saint. Herself having been imprisoned in the early 1970s for reasons viewed sweepingly as unjust and based on symbolic arguments, Davis emerged bravely and victoriously, towards increasingly defining American culture and politics. One facet of Davis’s path that ensued and unites her place in Fairey’s image further with Saint Margaret, the Venetian Campo, and the undercurrents of Obey is clear in her 1989 publication of the book Women, Culture, and Politics. Its section “On International Issues” specifies her interest in the German women’s rights activist Clara Zetkin, and precisely in Zetkin’s point that changes in economic systems have created objective circumstances for women to become explicitly conscious of oppression, and thus gain a “historical need” for emancipation.

This concept corresponds not only to the “goddesses” and “guards” that Fairey here depicts beneath Davis, who appear striving for freedom and peace following her revolutionary awareness raising. It also pulls from Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time that explicitly shaped Fairey’s manifesto, regarding Obey as a phenomenological signifier. Like in Dorsoduro, where females worked bravely and subversively, and in the case of da Varagine’s Margaret and Davis, the sense of “being” that Obey conveys through Heidegger is resolved by social relating or Verhalten. Fairey’s iconic Obey word, when rendered in red above black, chromatically reflecting the petals and designs that overlay Margherita, therefore emphasizes the cruciality to a group that these women in culture became.