February 3, 2009 The artist behind Obama's "Hope" image Play video

(Scot Yount, NECN) – Change was the message, hope the image. One picture of President Obama took the country by storm during the election campaign.

The artist is Shepard Fairey. Considered one of the most influential street artists in the United States -- Fairey has had his works displayed at the Smithsonian, the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert museum in London, and now the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

NECN’s Scot Yount spoke with Fairey about his grass roots efforts for the Obama campaign.

The Institute of Contemporary Art is abuzz. Street art--meets fashion, popular sentiment and politics.

Now on exhibition is, Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand. If Fairey's work seems familiar, it is likely because of this iconic image....it was a silent voice that spoke loudly to people all across America.

Shepard: "I felt it was important to try to put across the image that he could be president and make people comfortable with that idea."

This show features a 20-year span of Fairey's work. Humble beginnings, graffiti and posters. Andre the Giant, the deceased wrestler became the root of a campaign. Obey Giant: a theme he has used to great effect. Whether he is interpreting the image of a dead rock star or artist, cold war propaganda or a presidential candidate.

Jill: "He has an amazing ability to take a face and abstract it and to stylize it and elongate it and turn it into a logo."

There is a clear theme

of innovation in his combination of abstraction and figurative art. Its what he drew on to create the now ubiquitous Obama image. After permission from the campaign, he created it in one night.

By weeks end he had churned out 10, 000 posters. That number has now swelled beyond measure.

“I felt that when Obama was inaugurated that grass roots activism really works. People can make a difference even if they are not connected to power can make a difference. Democracy can work...Obama always says change happens from the bottom up was very well demonstrated by his campaign and that made me feel great.”

Shepard Fairey's art does not come with out controversy. Some of have even accused him of being a plagiarist, lifting the images of other artists without attribution. He likens it to a rock band cover another artist in a song. You don't say in the lyrics that it is a cover.

Shepard: "I've never heard a cover song where the band starts off saying the Beatles for example saying "this is our Buddy Holly cover" then they go into the cover."

Some examples. An unknown Chinese artist made this poster in 1968. Fairey's version called Guns and Roses bears striking resemblance.

This image created in the late 1930s as part of the WPA to promote national parks is clearly drawn from Fairey's greetings from iraq. Fairey believes he is making that art new.

Shepard: "Incorporating aspects of appropriated imagery from other sources is not valid in this day and age seems absurd in the pop art era...when Lichenstein and Wharhol and many other artists with the mustache on the Mona Lisa...from other's people's work..but yet they change the meaning with a different context and I feel like I do the same thing."

Jill: "I think that appropriation or the acknowledgement of the reproduced image is one of the key things in contemporary art and it is an idea that is very generative as we can see in the work of Shepard and so many other artists."

Fairey said off camera that he did borrow images in the early and mid nineties to make tee shirts and posters. Never dreaming that he would one day make a living from his art. There is little question that he has made much more than that. He has made an impression on the entire world. Part of a historic movement he is proud to have taken part in.

The portrait of president Obama now resides in the Smithsonian’s National portrait gallery.