BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
Went to Vegas and had a ball.
Okay, it was a sphere. Shepard Fairey’s Sphere. At least for a month.
Yes, it was street art… on a whole new level. We’ve been questioned endlessly over the last two decades about the true nature of art in the public sphere—pulling apart and examining the progenitors, the aspirations, the elements that comprise street art, graffiti, public art, and advertising—mainly because we wanted to understand the genesis of this story. Today we find that sometimes it all merges into one.
The opportunity to get your work up there, animated, glowing across 1.23 million puck-shaped LEDs, is awe-inspiring, no matter what you utter. This Exosphere swells the art and the message—Fairey’s familiar visual nomenclature—upward and spinning into the night sky, at once familiar and universal, activist and entertaining, reassuring and unsettling. Yes, it’s like getting up on a wall, except this one powers its content with 150 NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs, each packing 10,752 cores and 48 GB of memory, ensuring smooth high-res rendering.
The project: Earth Power Globe.
Created for Earth Month 2025 as part of the Sphere’s XO/Art program, Earth Power Globe is a 90-second animated mandala that merges Fairey’s bold graphic language with environmental themes and symbols. It pulses with life—air, water, and vegetation coursing through his palette—reminding us of both the earth’s fragility and the unfathomable force that nature can be. Nested within the rotating layers are references to ecological threats and utopian ideals, brought together in a style that is distinctly Fairey: floral, political, defiant, hopeful.
Shepard wasn’t alone in making it happen, and he always gives credit. The animation was brought to life with the help of The Mayda Creative Co. and MA+Group, whose teams helped translate his flat graphics into a fully immersive, kinetic experience—one that plays nightly on this, the largest LED screen on earth. For an artist whose career began with wheatpasted André the Giant posters, the moment may feel cosmic.
But Fairey’s presence in Las Vegas this month wasn’t limited to the Sphere. He also served as a guest judge for the XO Student Design Challenge, where students from the Las Vegas area submitted Earth Day-inspired designs for a chance to see their work projected onto the same Exosphere. It’s the kind of crossover between professional artist and next-gen creator that feels right—especially here, where public visibility, bold ideas, and a serious dedication to playfulness come together.
A la Fairey, the project blends art, message, and technology into something more than the sum of its parts. It’s street art, sure—but turned inside out, lit up, and rotating.
Yeah, you’ll have a ball.
