Shepard Fairey Murals, d3

These two murals in Dubai Design District (d3) are the first works Shepard Fairey — the American street artist and OBEY GIANT founder best known for the 2008 Barack Obama 'Hope' poster — ever made in the Middle East. He painted them in March 2021 with his crew, to coincide with his first regional solo exhibition, Future Mosaic, at Opera Gallery Dubai, in partnership with d3.

The pair sits on two walls facing each other at a prominent entrance to the district, between Building 10 and Building 11. One, Rise Above Peace Fingers, layers an intricately patterned peace sign over a fist holding a flower that doubles as a paintbrush — in Fairey's words, the fist for strength and empowerment, the paintbrush for art, the flower for something positive, growing and blooming. The facing wall, Rise Above Dove, centres on a peace dove among camellia flowers, a motif drawn directly from the Future Mosaic exhibition. Both are executed in Fairey's signature palette of bright red, blue and yellow set against black and white, and both carry his recurring 'Rise Above' text and arrows.

The works were conceived as a statement on cross-cultural common ground. Fairey framed the commission around shared values between Dubai and the US — justice, peace and tolerance — and noted that the footprint of the nearby Burj Khalifa echoes the mandala, a motif that recurs throughout his practice. Many of the Future Mosaic pieces deliberately reference traditional Middle Eastern and Arabic design.

The two murals are in Dubai Design District (d3), on facing walls at a prominent entrance between Building 10 and Building 11. Park in the d3 visitor parking and walk toward the Building 10/11 entrance; the peace-dove wall and the fist-and-paintbrush wall stand opposite one another, so you can see both from the passage between them.