Politics
Ai Weiwei and Shepard Fairey Create Protest Skateboards to Mark Trump’s First 100 Days
For the collector who likes to take his resistance art on the road.
For the collector who likes to take his resistance art on the road.
Henri Neuendorf ShareShare This Article
That’s one way to deck the Donald. Ai Weiwei and Shepard Fairey have teamed up with skateboarding non-profit The Skateroom—which supports charitable initiatives through the sale of fine art skateboard decks—to create works that take aim at American president Donald Trump.
According to the Skateroom’s website, the artists were given a carte blanche to create whatever they wanted. The works are marketed prominently on the site’s homepage under the banner “#100daysoftrump.”
Ai created a three-deck triptych that shows the artist’s middle finger raised towards the White House. The deck reprises a work from his famous series Fuck Off (1995-2003), in which he flipped the bird to monuments and sites of authority around the world. The deck is on offer for a cheeky $666 (though the first 66 hand-signed versions cost a heftier $3,000). A “significant portion” of sales from the edition will go toward two NGOs that Ai selected: Halklarin köprüsü in Turkey and B’Tselem in Israel.
Shepard Fairey’s contribution is no subtler. The street artist created a triptych showing a man reading a newspaper emblazoned with the text, “No future for apathy! Ignorance! Sexism! Xenophobia! Racism!” It is available in an edition of 450 for $450 each. Twenty percent of the Skateroom’s profit from the series will be donated to the Amplifier Foundation, which also produced Fairey’s We the People series of prints, released earlier this year.
“My art is usually social and political regardless of who is in the White House, but my concerns and frustrations are amplified by the election of Donald Trump,” Fairey says in a statement on the Skateroom’s website. “Trump appealed to an uninformed electorate who looked for scapegoats and were driven by most likely one or more of the dark impulses listed in the image.”