Ominous Ripples: Fairey’s 2026 Greenpeace-benefit screenprint

The April release

Ominous Ripples was released through Obey Giant on April 23, 2026 at 10 a.m. PDT, priced at $100. The 24-inch-high by 36-inch-wide screenprint is on 80# cream Speckletone paper, signed by Shepard Fairey and numbered in an edition of 500. A Verisart digital certificate accompanied the release. The official announcement identifies Greenpeace as the beneficiary of a portion of proceeds, without specifying the percentage.

This is a historical release record. The official archive supplies the edition specifications, while the contemporaneous announcement establishes the scheduled sale. Neither an old announcement nor the absence of a sold-out badge is a dependable statement of present stock.

Two kinds of surface

The exact release image splits attention between water and ornament. On the left, a person’s eyes meet the viewer above a dark expanse of concentric ripples. On the right, a large warm-coloured flower presses against sharply bounded red, yellow and teal passages. The water’s horizontal movement is interrupted by these upright fragments, so the composition does not settle into a conventional tranquil seascape.

That interruption is the image’s most consequential device. The submerged face creates an immediate human scale, while the collage-like side panels suggest systems and forces beyond a single person. Decorative beauty does not cancel the threat; it competes for attention with it. Looking between the two halves reproduces, in miniature, the difficulty of sustaining attention on environmental danger when other images remain so seductive.

The wide sheet makes room for that unstable coexistence. Cropping the work to the eyes or the flower would preserve an attractive detail but lose the argument made by their proximity. For a collector comparing this image with a portrait-centred Fairey print, its landscape orientation is part of its content, not just a framing preference.

Dreams of Peace uses the same 80# cream Speckletone support and a signed edition of 500, but turns the 24-by-36-inch dimensions upright. Its larger King portrait anchors discrete patterned panels; Ominous Ripples gives much of its landscape field to water around a much smaller face. That change makes vulnerability, rather than an exemplary public figure, the viewer’s entry point. Matching paper and edition counts do not make the two prints substitutes in a collection of Fairey’s civic imagery.

Environmental context and edition identity

Fairey’s accompanying statement frames the work as a warning about climate-related hardship and the effects future generations will inherit. The print’s benefit component connects that statement to Greenpeace, but the announced arrangement is a partial-proceeds contribution; it should not be described as a donation of the entire sale price.

The identifiable object is the signed 500-copy screenprint, with its specified cream paper and landscape dimensions. Those details matter when the image circulates as a cropped online picture. The image communicates the environmental theme, while the edition specifications establish what was actually sold. Proof quantities and a completed donation total are not given in the cited release sources, so neither can be reconstructed from the edition size and issue price alone.