This is Shepard Fairey's Worker's Rights — an original screen print hand-signed and numbered by Fairey in pencil. The work is one of Fairey's most historically grounded social justice prints, placing his unmistakable propaganda-portrait aesthetic directly in service of the American labor movement and the legacy of Cesar Chavez. It combines a monumental heroic portrait with layered newspaper source material drawn from coverage of the United Farm Workers, pesticide poisoning of farm workers, and the grape and lettuce boycotts of the late 1960s and 1970s.

The composition is dense with intentional visual argument. In the foreground, a close-cropped figure gazes upward in the classic heroic-aspirational pose Fairey has used throughout his career — rendered in his signature high-contrast stencil style in cream, gold, red, and black. A raised fist bearing a diagonal-striped sash (an explicit echo of the UFW flag's visual language) dominates the mid-composition. Behind all of this, the background is constructed from collaged newspaper clippings whose text is legible on close inspection: references to Cesar Chavez, the California Labor Federation, crop spraying and pesticide illness, and the words "Organize" and "Lettuce" — the core demands and tactics of the UFW's decades-long struggle for farm worker dignity.

A red circle — Fairey's recurring solar motif — anchors the upper right of the composition. The total effect is of a 1930s–40s labor movement poster channeled through Fairey's post-postmodern lens: deeply aware of its own propaganda grammar, and deploying that grammar to honor rather than mock. In a body of work defined by interrogating authority and image, Worker's Rights stands out as one of the works where Fairey's sincerity is most legible.

Cesar Chavez co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers) with Dolores Huerta in 1962. The UFW's campaigns — including the Delano grape strike (1965–1970) and subsequent grape and lettuce boycotts — became among the most visible labor actions in American history, drawing support from the civil rights movement, the Catholic Church, and millions of ordinary Americans who stopped buying grapes and lettuce in solidarity with farm workers facing poverty wages and pesticide poisoning in California's Central Valley. The newspaper clippings embedded in this print's background are drawn directly from that period's coverage.

Fairey's engagement with labor history is not superficial. He has consistently cited the visual language of WPA-era labor posters, Soviet constructivist graphics, and UFW silk-screens as direct influences on his own practice. Worker's Rights makes that lineage explicit: the raised fist, the heroic upward gaze, the bold typography, and the use of collaged documentary source material are all formal gestures borrowed from that tradition and returned, updated and re-signed, to the contemporary moment. For Fairey, honoring the workers' rights struggle is also a meditation on how visual culture produces and reinforces political identity.

Born 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina, Shepard Fairey launched the Andre the Giant Has a Posse wheat-paste campaign in 1989 while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design — and never stopped. By the mid-2000s his OBEY Giant imagery was recognized across dozens of countries, his prints sold through galleries in Los Angeles, New York, and London, and his influence on graphic design, skateboarding culture, and political street art was well established. His 2008 Obama HOPE poster entered the Smithsonian Institution and became one of the most recognized political images of the 21st century.

Throughout his career, Fairey has consistently returned to labor history, social justice, and the visual grammar of political organizing as subject matter. Works like Worker's Rights represent the serious intellectual core beneath the mass-market recognition: a sustained, studied argument about how images shape politics, and a genuine tribute to the organizers and movements that used visual culture to fight for human dignity. His work is held in MoMA New York, LACMA, the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and dozens of major institutional collections internationally.

• Original Shepard Fairey Worker's Rights screen print
• Hand-signed by Shepard Fairey in pencil — lower margin
• Hand-numbered in pencil — lower margin (confirm edition number before listing)
• Multi-color screen print on cream Speckletone — unframed, stored flat
• Gauntlet Gallery digital provenance documentation