This is Shepard Fairey’s Sinking Liberty — the most viscerally iconic and emotionally direct work in the 2017 “Damaged Stencil Series.” Printed in deep black ink on cream Speckletone paper, it is part of a set of eight prints released together in December 2017 to accompany Fairey’s largest-ever solo exhibition, DAMAGED, at Subliminal Projects in Los Angeles. The series was sold exclusively as a complete 8-print set: individual prints were never available separately at retail, making single examples genuinely scarce on the secondary market.

The composition delivers its message with the clarity of a manifesto: the Statue of Liberty — America’s most universally recognized symbol of freedom and welcome — is submerged to her waist in dark, churning water. Her torch remains raised above the surface, flame still burning, in an act of defiant persistence. Concentric ripple rings radiate outward from where her figure meets the waterline, rendered in Fairey’s bold stencil style as precise white arcs against the dense black field — the water not splashing but settling, as though the sinking has been happening slowly, for some time. Below the waterline, the submerged lower half of her figure and plinth dissolves into a dense, dark photographic collage layer: architectural fragments, natural forms, and layered ephemera pressed into the murk.

The upper field surrounds her with Fairey’s signature collage vocabulary: botanical engravings, the OBEY gear-star emblem, damask patterns, and fingerprint-like textured forms that dissolve into the atmospheric background. The composition’s upper-left corner retains the characteristic ragged, fraying border of the Damaged Stencil Series — torn-edge printed design elements that simulate the look of a wheat-paste poster pulled from a wall, giving the print the urgency of street ephemera and the permanence of museum-quality offset printing simultaneously.

Of all eight prints in the Damaged Stencil Series, Sinking Liberty carries the most immediate symbolic weight. The Statue of Liberty needs no editorial caption — her meaning is globally legible, her sinking universally understood as a statement about what America was losing in the period that produced this work. Fairey’s formal decision to keep the torch above the waterline is the print’s most important detail: this is not a dirge but a warning and a challenge. The flame survives. Whether it continues to do so depends on who is watching and what they do about it.

The concentric water ripples are rendered with a precision that elevates them beyond mere surface detail — they are formally perfect, almost mandala-like in their regularity, creating a visual tension between the stillness of geometric pattern and the violence of what it represents. The OBEY gear-star emblem appearing in the background upper right operates as both signature and commentary: the machinery of the brand, and by extension the machinery of all brands, all institutional symbols, all manufactured icons of nationhood, cycling on indifferently as the figure they are meant to represent submerges.

The botanical collage layers and damask patterns in the background — recurring across the entire series — here take on additional resonance. Nature continues, decorative pattern persists, while the symbolic architecture of the nation sinks. The print was created in the first year of the Trump administration, in the same moment as the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, travel bans, and the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. Sinking Liberty is its era’s most distilled visual statement, rendered in Fairey’s most stripped-down, urgent formal register.

This is the final print in the Damaged Stencil Series — its most iconic image. The full set of 8, each 18″ × 24″ offset on cream Speckletone, edition of 400:

Born 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina, Shepard Fairey studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and launched his career with the Andre the Giant Has a Posse wheat-paste campaign — one of the first viral street art movements — which evolved into the global OBEY brand. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, MoMA New York, LACMA, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His 2008 Obama HOPE poster remains one of the most recognized political images of the 21st century. Sinking Liberty belongs in that same lineage of instantly legible, politically charged image-making — an artist who has spent three decades proving that the most powerful messages travel in the simplest forms.

• Original Shepard Fairey Sinking Liberty offset lithograph, Damaged Stencil Series, 2017
• Hand-signed in pencil by Shepard Fairey
• Hand-numbered in pencil — numbered edition of 400
• Single-color black offset on cream Speckletone paper — unframed, stored flat
• Gauntlet Gallery digital provenance documentation