Obey Giant / Andre the Giant Has a Posse

The "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" campaign represents one of the earliest examples of viral street art and serves as a foundational work in contemporary meme culture. Created in 1989 by Shepard Fairey while he was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, the sticker began as what Fairey described as a "spontaneous, happy accident" that would evolve into a global cultural phenomenon (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025).

The original concept emerged when Fairey was teaching a friend how to make stencils in the summer of 1989. "I looked for a picture to use in the newspaper, and there just happened to be an ad for wrestling with André the Giant," Fairey explained. The group of friends he 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" (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025).

Initially intended as an inside joke among friends, the sticker featured the professional wrestler André the Giant alongside the phrase "ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE 7'4", 520lb." What began as amusement for skateboarding buddies quickly gained traction within the skateboarding and punk communities (RISD News, 2019). Fairey and fellow RISD students Ryan Lesser, Blaize Blouin, Alfred Hawkins and Mike Mongo created paper and vinyl stickers that began appearing in cities across the United States, distributed through the skater community and graffiti artists (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025).

Fairey described the campaign as "an experiment in phenomenology," aiming to make people question their surroundings and the messages they consume (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025). The ambiguous nature of the sticker encouraged viewers to seek meaning, thereby engaging them in a dialogue about art and perception. As Fairey noted, "The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker" (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025).

By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of paper and vinyl stickers were photocopied and hand-silkscreened and distributed worldwide (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025). The campaign's success led to legal challenges when the threat of a lawsuit from Titan Sports, Inc. (the parent company of the World Wrestling Federation) in the mid-1990s spurred Fairey to stop using André the Giant's trademarked name and image (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025).

This legal pressure catalyzed the campaign's evolution into "OBEY Giant." Fairey developed a stylized version of the wrestler's face accompanied by the word "OBEY," drawing inspiration from John Carpenter's 1988 film They Live, which critiques consumerism and authoritarianism. "They Live was...the basis for my use of the word 'obey'," Fairey explained. "The movie has a very strong message about the power of commercialism and the way that people are manipulated by advertising" (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025).

The "OBEY Giant" imagery became a global phenomenon, appearing on stickers, posters, and murals worldwide. Its widespread dissemination challenged traditional notions of art, branding, and propaganda, influencing various aspects of popular culture and inspiring numerous parodies and adaptations. The original "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" sticker format has been widely imitated for humorous effect, spawning parodies like "Tattoo the Midget Has a Bigger Posse," "Charles Darwin Has a Posse," and "Ralph Nader Has a Posse" (Wikipedia Contributors, 2025).

The campaign's impact extended far beyond street art, establishing principles of viral marketing and guerrilla tactics that would later become standard practice in digital culture. Fairey's willingness to "get up" (put up stickers and posters) across the nation, including arrests in Philadelphia, Long Beach, and New York, earned him street credibility and demonstrated the power of grassroots distribution networks (Obey Giant, 2015).