I was walking home from yoga when I spotted what looked like a Fairey next to Tomorrowland, near North Miami Avenue and 14th Street. Was it a Peace Guard? I went closer to make sure, and that is a though street to cross by foot and worse biking. There she was, so crisp and fresh, on a wall I was used to passing. I felt that rush of finding street art unexpectedly.
Peace Guard by Shepard Fairey, photo by Nadia Bouzid
I love these encounters, especially when a familiar face turns up somewhere new. There is a high to it, an satisfaction that makes me want to stay a little longer. If i’m visting a museum or a gallery it is different, I have gone there to look at art. Here I was just going home, and suddenly there was something I wanted to spend time with. It felt almost as though the piece had found me. One of those little joys of everyday life that I can photograph, but never quite bring home with me.
The building is 14 NW 14th Street, a single-storey commercial property dating to 1961, immediately beside Tomorrowland. Coming south on North Miami Avenue, the road bends at the triangular traffic island and opens the view toward the facade. The piece faced that approach, with the red circle behind the guard’s head standing out against the white wall. I could see the appeal of the position: a small building with a clear view of arriving traffic, right on the way downtown.
The image is Peace Guard 2, introduced in 2016 as a loose sequel to Fairey’s 2008 Peace Guard. The earlier work was a collaboration with photographer Kai Regan, whose photograph Fairey used for his illustration. Fairey has returned to the imagery in different works and materials, including screen prints. Here, it was a paper poster pasted to the building.
Peace Guard photo by Nadia Bouzid
In 2017, he took Peace Guard 2 to Lisbon as a mural and released Peace Guard 2 Stencil (Lisbon) through Underdogs. The carnation emerging from the rifle has a particular resonance there. During Portugal’s revolution of April 25, 1974, flowers placed in soldiers’ gun barrels became a symbol of the uprising that overthrew the dictatorship. Fairey has explained that his flower-in-the-gun motif came from Vietnam-era antiwar protests, and that he welcomed its connection to Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. The guard carries the visual authority of military propaganda, with a message asking for peace. Fairey called it “militant vigilance.”
I took these photographs on November 27, 2019, during an autumn of demonstrations in Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon and elsewhere. An image of resistance and restraint had plenty to speak to. Miami, meanwhile, was getting ready for Art Week. Exactly a week later, Fairey’s Facing the Giant: Three Decades of Dissent opened at GGA Gallery for Wynwood Walls’ tenth anniversary. His work was about to be presented as a thirty-year survey, while this version was already out on an ordinary building, catching someone on her way home.
Once I find a piece I like, I begin looking forward to seeing it again. I check for it when I pass, and I am disappointed when I come back and it is gone. I like that uncertainty about street art, even while wishing a particular piece would stay. One day it is there, the next it is gone. A photograph lets me look at the image again, but I would rather have another few minutes in front of the wall.
I don’t know exactly when this Fairey arrived. I do remember she was gone a few days later.
