Raw Power

Raw Power joined music-related imagery and social-justice themes in a two-venue Shepard Fairey presentation in Asbury Park. Jonathan LeVine Projects, Parlor Gallery, and Wooden Walls presented the exhibition at Parlor Gallery and The Art Spot, with a confirmed public start of September 17, 2026. The artist's announcement describes more than 150 works distributed across the two spaces.

The announced selection spans paintings, mixed-media works on paper, hand-painted multiples, mono-engravings, and prints on wood and metal. This range gives the show a material breadth that the word prints alone would miss. It also places objects with different production histories inside one exhibition: a unique work on paper, a hand-worked multiple, and a screen print may share graphic concerns without being interchangeable catalogue categories.

The exhibition also formed part of a wider Asbury Park visit. Fairey announced a boardwalk mural associated with Wooden Walls’ PlusOne program, as well as a DJ set and talk at Sea Hear Now. Those separate activities give the music connection a local setting: gallery objects, a public wall, and a festival audience offered different encounters with the artist’s work. They remain distinct events rather than extra exhibition venues.

Music supplies more than a convenient theme for portraits. The exhibition's title invokes the energy of Iggy and the Stooges, while the artist's statement connects music's accessibility and emotional force with his own circulation of images. One way to read that relationship is to distinguish subject from method. A picture can depict a musician, but its scale, repetition, or force of address can also seek something analogous to music's capacity to gather an audience.

That analogy raises useful questions without requiring a claim that a visual work literally reproduces a musical experience. Does familiarity draw a viewer into a message, or allow the message to be overlooked? Can a recognizable cultural figure carry an argument about justice without reducing the figure to an emblem? A show connecting music with civic themes invites those questions, but the public overview does not settle them for every individual work.

The two locations remain occurrences of one jointly announced exhibition. Their receptions were separately scheduled: The Art Spot on September 17 and Parlor Gallery on September 18, both from 6 to 10 p.m. Those events should not be merged into one venue or used to invent a touring sequence. The presentation was described as occupying two spaces, not as moving from one to the other.