Okay, it was pretty much a given that Obama would be Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. What is truly awesome is seeing Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama portrait on newsstands as the Time cover.

Fairey’s art developed out of street and skate culture, and he sits on the board of Reaching to Embrace the Arts, a not-for-profit organization that provides art supplies to disadvantaged schools and students, so he’s pretty much setting th stage for the next wave of socially themed artists

San Diego Union Tribune art critic Robert L. Pincus says Fairey’s work

is political art with a strong sense of visual style and emotional authenticity. Even in times when political art has ebbed, Fairey’s has just the right balance of seriousness, irony and wit to fit the mood of the moment.

Fairey’s images of Obama have become inextricably linked with the campaign, and as he told Suicide Girls:

With the Obama image, I’m the one that set it in motion — how it was going to be disseminated and put up on the streets. And there was this people’s movement, this grass roots movement vibe to it that I think was really important…I donated an image to them, which they used. It was the one that said "Change" underneath it. And then later on I did another one that said "Vote" underneath it, that had Obama smiling. But the image that I continued to put out there myself, they couldn’t have any affiliation with it because it was being perpetuated illegally in a lot of ways, and so I just continued to do that on my own without any coordination with them, and that was the "Hope" image.

Funding his grassroots electioneering through poster and fine art sales, Fairey distributed a staggering 300,000 stickers and 500,000 posters during the election campaign.