Shepard Fairey’s Obey Female Muslim, 2005.

Obey Giant Art

Pop Art pioneer Andy Warhol once defined art as “what you can get away with.”

Fittingly, that short but provocative phrase also turns up in the first museum survey devoted to the work of Shepard Fairey, the celebrated street artist and graphic designer who created the now-iconic Obama “Hope” poster during last year’s presidential campaign.

Like Warhol, Fairey has a knack for blurring distinctions between fine and commercial art and for using pop-culture images to connect with non-art audiences. He’s also an acknowledged master of screen printing, a commercial art technique that Warhol helped popularize through his silkscreen portraits of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and other celebrities.

At the same time, “Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand,” which opens tomorrow at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, reveals an artist who is much more socially and politically engaged than Warhol ever was. In fact, the exhibit of more than 200 prints, paintings, stickers and other works brims with politically combustible images — among them, a burqa-clad Arab woman brandishing an AK-47 and a portrait of George W. Bush as a blood-sucking vampire. (Fairey’s portrait of Obama, on the other hand, is one of the show’s few purely positive political images.)

Even a gallery filled with portraits of Fairey’s musical heroes suggests someone determined to rattle the status quo. Among those on Fairey’s musical Top 10 list: reggae great Bob Marley, punk rocker Johnny Rotten and the late rapper Tupac Shakur. (For some reason, Fairey’s near-contemporary at the Rhode Island School of Design, David Byrne, didn’t make the list.)

Of course, defiance of one sort or another — of government tyranny, social taboos, private property, even good taste — is one of the prime motivations for street art. Whether they carry a backpack full of spray paints or (in Fairey’s case) a stack of posters and a bucket of wheat paste, many street artists see themselves as part of a larger social and political struggle.

Fairey’s art, which has its roots in the skateboarding and punk rock scenes of the 1980s and early 1990s, fits easily into this anti-authoritarian tradition. Indeed, Fairey has been arrested several times for vandalism— something he, like most street artists, considers a badge of honor.

But Fairey’s politics, like his art, are more nuanced than you might expect. Rather than espousing a particular cause or movement, most of Fairey’s work is designed to do something even more radical: get people thinking and talking about the world around them.

A good example of this open-ended approach is the “Obey Giant” campaign that Fairey began in 1989 while still a RISD student. In interviews, Fairey has said that he first stumbled on the campaign’s central image — a close-up of the pro wrestler André the Giant — while leafing through a local newspaper. Without giving it much thought, he scribbled the phrase “has a posse” after the wrestler’s name and then Xeroxed the image onto a sheet of adhesive-backed paper

At first, Fairey considered the “André the Giant has a posse” stickers something of a lark. But as the stickers began proliferating around Providence — and as people began buzzing about what they meant and who was behind them — his attitude began to change.

What started as a joke became a way to get people to question their surroundings. In particular, Fairey took aim at the consumerist messages in ads, billboards and other form of mass media. (One memorable effort involved pasting a portrait of André the Giant over an election-year billboard touting the accomplishments of former Providence mayor Buddy Cianci.)

Since then, the André the Giant image has become a Fairey signature, appearing on everything from his fine-art prints and paintings to a line of commercially licensed skateboards and street clothes. It’s also spread around the world, decorating (or defacing) buildings from Dublin to Des Moines.

The image has also evolved over time. In its earliest form — a grainy head-and-shoulders portrait of André the Giant, along with his height and weight (7 foot 4 inches, 250 lb.) and the phrase “André the Giant has a posse” — its newsprint origins are still easy to trace. Later, Fairey would strip away the words and reduce the portrait to a taut, closely cropped close-up. The result — a kind of brooding, semi-abstract André — has been Fairey’s go-to image ever since.

In 1995, Fairey began adding the word “Obey” to his André the Giant posters. (At a press conference on Tuesday, Fairey said he’d been inspired by watching They Live, a John Carpenter film in which aliens control the earth by embedding subliminal messages in the mass media. Fairey said his use of the word was ironic and intended to inspire resistance, not obedience.)

Fairey’s André the Giant posters also highlight another aspect of his work: his tendency to recycle images. As visitors enter the ICA show, for example, one of the first things they see is group of four large posters. In the first two, André’s craggy, heavy-lidded visage fills most of the space. But in the second two, he’s more of a Where’s Waldo-type presence — hidden in plain sight.

While André the Giant and Barack Obama are the best known members of Fairey’s own art-posse, they’re not the only ones. In fact, Fairey’s personal stash of images — many of them borrowed or “ripped” from other sources — has grown to dizzying proportions over the years.

Wandering through the ICA show, for example, turns up references to everything from psychedelic posters (notably an homage to 1960s poster designer John van Hamersveld called Fillmore Andre) to vintage postcards (a 1940s Old Faithful postcard re-purposed as a protest against the Iraq War) and Asian and Middle Eastern art (especially noticeable in Fairey’s most recent posters and murals). Other sources range from 1950’s menswear ads to Soviet-era propaganda posters.

(Such borrowings have occasionally gotten Fairey into trouble. The now-famous Obama poster, for example, was based on an Associated Press photograph taken at a 2006 panel discussion on the genocide in Darfur. So far, the photographer, Mannie Garcia, has declined to take legal action, but others have accused Fairey of illegally benefiting from someone else’s work. Fairey, meanwhile, has strongly defended his actions on both legal and artistic grounds.)

To help viewers make sense of Fairey’s work, the ICA has divided “Supply and Demand” into seven thematic sections. The opening section, for example, is dubbed “Propaganda” and explores Fairey’s subversive use of both commercial advertising and propaganda.

Other sections focus on his anti-war posters (“War and Peace”), his artistic process (“Stylized”), his portraits of musicians (“Music”) and the social and political implications of his work (“Question Everything”). Meanwhile, Fairey and a team of assistants have created a series of street-art murals around Boston. A map showing the locations of the murals is at www.ica.org.

(Sadly, there is no similar map for Providence, where Fairey and his team have installed several new outdoor murals. So far, the murals have turned up on the AS220-owned Dreyfus Building on Washington Street and the Nice Slice pizzeria on Thayer Street. A third mural, on Westminster Street, was removed last week.)

Interestingly, Fairey seems to be at his worst when he’s actively trying to pay his respects to someone or something he likes. That includes his rather humdrum portraits of rappers and rockers and — sorry, Obama fans — his now-famous portrait of our current president.

On the other hand, his Obey Giant posters are as strong as ever — boldly graphic and filled with a weird mix of offbeat humor and Big Brother-ish paranoia. (Think George Orwell meets the WWF.)

Still, it’s the sheer range of issues and images that Fairey’s work conjures up — everything from war and peace to freedom of expression and the nature of creativity— that may be the show’s biggest revelation. Indeed, it’s possible that Fairey, who’s still only 38, could turn out to be as central to his era as Warhol was to his.

“Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand” opens tomorrow and runs through Aug. 16 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 100 Northern Ave., Boston. For more information, call (617) 478-3100 or visit www.ica.org.

bvansicl@projo.com