André the Giant Has a Posse

Andre the Giant Has a Posse is a street art campaign based on a design by Shepard Fairey created in 1989 in Providence, Rhode Island. Distributed by the community, the stickers featuring an image of André the Giant began showing up in many cities across the US. At the time Fairey declared the campaign to be "an experiment in phenomenology". Over time the artwork has been reused in a number of ways and has become worldwide. At the same time, Fairey altered the work stylistically and semantically into the OBEY Giant.

Fairey and fellow Rhode Island School of Design student Ryan Lesser, along with Blaize Blouin, Laura Rice, Alfred Hawkins, and Mike Mongo created paper and vinyl stickers and posters with an image of the wrestler André the Giant and the text "ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE 7' 4", 520 lb", ("7'4", 520 lbs"—2.24 m, 236 kg—famously being Andre The Giant's billed height and weight) as an in-joke directed at hip hop and subculture, and then began clandestinely (and somewhat fanatically) propagating and posting them in Providence, Rhode Island and the rest of the Eastern United States.

In an interview with Format magazine in 2008, Fairey said: "The Andre The Giant sticker was just a spontaneous, happy accident. I was teaching a friend how to make stencils in the summer of 1989, and I looked for a picture to use in the newspaper, and there just happened to be an ad for wrestling with André the Giant and I told him that he should make a stencil of it. He said 'Nah, I’m not making a stencil of that, that’s stupid!' but I thought it was funny so I made the stencil and I made a few stickers and the group of guys I was hanging out with always called each other The Posse, so it said Andre The Giant Has A Posse, and it was sort of appropriated from hip-hop slang – Public Enemy, N.W.A, and Ice-T were all using the word."

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