OBEY: Power to the Peaceful

OBEY: Power to the Peaceful presented more than a hundred works by Shepard Fairey at Gallerie d'Italia in Naples. Curated by Giuseppe Pizzuto and produced in collaboration with Wunderkammern, the exhibition brought screen prints, unique pieces, and hand-finished multiples into a discussion of peace, communication, justice, and collective responsibility. The confirmed public run was May 6 through September 13, 2026.

The title gives the exhibition a productive tension. Power can describe the capacity to impose a demand, but it can also describe the capacity to organize, communicate, or refuse violence. Placing the peaceful in relation to power avoids reducing peace to a purely passive condition. As an interpretive proposition, the title asks whether a forceful visual language can support solidarity without simply reproducing the authority it criticizes.

The museum’s illustrated selection makes the range more precise. Obama Hope is captioned as a 2008 lithograph, Make Art Not War as a 2019 screen print with mixed media on paper, and Uplift Justice as a 2025 mixed-media work on canvas. These three objects put a named political figure, a direct anti-war statement, and an appeal to justice within the same exhibition. Their different dates resist a reading of the presentation as a response to only one recent event. Their different supports also make the question of communication tangible: the exhibition moves between a reproducible image on paper, a hand-finished printed object, and a canvas work. That comparison is more informative than assuming that a single graphic language entails a single way of making or encountering an artwork.

The museum's stated attention to communication and consensus makes that question especially relevant. A poster or print must often convey something quickly, yet speed of recognition is not the same as agreement. Familiar graphic signals can attract a viewer before the viewer has decided what to think. The exhibition's thematic frame encourages a second stage of looking: after an image has caught attention, what kind of participation does it ask for, and whose interests does its message serve?

The varied formats provide another route through the subject. A reproducible print and a hand-finished multiple may carry related imagery while presenting different material experiences. A unique work can make surface and scale prominent in ways that a widely circulating reproduction cannot fully preserve. None of these formats is automatically more politically effective than another. Their differences instead invite consideration of how an image moves between concentrated viewing and broad distribution.