Charleston native and world-famous artist Shepard Fairey created murals all over the city in 2014 during his exhibition at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, The Insistent Image: Recurring Motifs in the Art of Shepard Fairey and Jasper Johns.
Now, two Charleston tech entrepreneurs are digitizing remaining murals by the locally-raised artist to preserve them.
Fairey is widely known for his contemporary street art – starting with his Barack Obama “Hope” poster during the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
Of the five Charleston murals Fairey created in 2014, only three remain, and one is in imminent danger of being lost forever — the “Power and Glory” mural on the Calhoun side of the College of Charleston dormitory College Lodge, which is set for demolition.
That demolition would leave only two of the five murals from the project remaining, which is why Doug Hamilton, founder of CharlestonHacks and Paul Turner, CEO and founder of Virtual America, are teaming up to digitize the murals — creating high resolution 3D scans and virtual tours to capture these landmarks.
Project aims to capture Charleston today
Hamilton said the project to digitize these murals is an effort towards “creative placemaking” — a term that refers to bringing different disciplines together to create positive change. In this case, tech and art combine to preserve these murals that Hamilton and Turner believe are important pieces of a Charleston legacy.
“Shepard Fairey is a huge artist that’s talked about almost in the same way as Banksy. Different, but that level of iconic. Everywhere I go, he’s collected, he’s in museums — and he’s from Charleston. He went to Porter Gaud. It’s definitely something we can and should own as a community in a very intentional way.”
But a lot has happened since Fairey made these murals in 2014, Hamilton said. For example, there’s the recent announcement to tear down College Lodge. “That raises a huge question of, if they actually do that, what will happen to the mural?”
Hamilton and Turner’s project is still in the early stages, with more to develop later this summer. The duo has no shortage of ideas of what they might like to do with the project once they capture the murals using Virtual America’s 3-D mapping technology — they mentioned potentially projection mapping the murals into new spaces, like the vacant warehouses in North Charletson’s Navy Yard.
Turner said the project will definitely amount to some “interesting hybrid of physical and virtual space.”
There’s potential, Hamilton added, to make a new landmark surrounding the fact that Fairey is a Charleston-born artist.
“In Europe, there’s really amazing things going on with museums, how immersive and interactive they are… We don’t really have one of those yet. I think these kinds of experiential spaces that bring art and tech together are really important. People come to Charleston for a reason, like Spoleto, for example. Imagine you come to Charleston to see a Shepard Fairey museum. It’s one of those things where the more you build culture, the more rich your community is.”
So while the project is still in its early stages, Hamilton and Turner said they’re excited to find a way to take the ephemeral street art of Shepard Fairey into a new form where future generations can still know of and enjoy it — even if the murals do get demolished.
“This street artwork, it’s very ephemeral,” Hamilton said. “So 40 years from now, when these hit 50, will anybody ever know they were here? Or even 100 years from now? When people look back, what will they know about Charleston? Chances are, most of the iconic historic buildings will still be with us some 40 years from now, though they may be underwater. Who knows? We still worry a lot about what Rome used to look like 2,000 years ago. We’ve invested a lot of energy to try to scan and recreate the Roman Forum and other buildings that are gone…
“So I would argue that we need to be thinking ahead – I view this work as building a digital archive of Charleston in 2024. It’s work to benefit Charleston 2050, Charleston 2100.”
Stay tuned for an update story as more develops over this summer. For now, you can check out these links to see the initial 3-D scans of the two murals on King Street: this one is outside of The Daily and this one is near Urban Outfitters.
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