Frank Shepard Fairey or Shepard Fairey, also known by the pseudonym OBEY, was born on February 15, 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina. He is an American street artist, screen printer, muralist and illustrator.

Frank Fairey was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. His father was a doctor at the time. He got into art in 1984, at the age of 14, and began designing for t-shirts and skateboards.

Fairey graduated from Wando High School in 1988. While attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1989, he created the André the Giant Has a Posse sticker campaign, resulting in the Obey Giant campaign. The campaign became, in Fairey's words, an "experiment in phenomenology."

He graduated from RISD in 1992 with a Master of Arts in Illustration5, and currently resides in Los Angeles, California with his wife Amanda and daughters Vivienne and Madeline6.

Using the slogan The Medium is the Message borrowed from Marshall McLuhan, Fairey became one of the most well-known artists of the 2000s. Originally the founder of the graphic design group BLK/MRKT [archive] with other graphic designers and artist Dave Kinsey, Fairey left in 2003 and joined Studio Number One.

In 2004, Fairey, Robbie Conal and Mear One created a series of "anti-war, anti-Bush" posters for the Post Gen collective for a street art campaign called "Be the Revolution".

His work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian, the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His first museum retrospective, Supply & Demand (of the same name as his book), opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, from February 6 to August 16, 2009.

He continued his graffiti activities, however, which led to his arrest again in February 2010.