DALLAS, TX.- Of the innumerable iterations of Shepard Fairey's once-inescapable HOPE posters made in 2008 to support Barack Obama's presidential campaign, there are but three original large-scale, mixed-media stenciled collages made by the artist. One is in a private collection. Another resides in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery, just blocks from the White House.

And the third, from the assemblage of a major American Art collector, serves as the centerpiece of Heritage Auctions' May 19 Modern & Contemporary Art Signature® Auction, which is now open for bidding.

"This work is a significant cultural icon, and it was the defining image of Barack Obama's campaign," says Heritage Auctions' Taylor Curry, Director of Modern & Contemporary Art, of the enormous work that blanketed the American landscape in 2008 and '09. "It's instantly recognizable worldwide, and we are honored to bring it to the auction."

Indeed, HOPE is the work The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl called "the most efficacious American political illustration since Uncle Sam Wants You"; a work, wrote the critic, that provided "a thrill of concerted purpose, guarded against fatuity by coolly candid deliberation." Wrote Schjeldahl of Fairey's collage, its image of Obama infamously lifted from Associated Press photographer Mannie Garcia's shot of the then-senator at a 2006 National Press Club event, "the effect is that of epic poetry in an everyday tongue."

Fairey, of course, was a graphic-design star and revered activist long before his HOPE spread across the country. As his Obey Giant website notes, he has been "manufacturing quality dissent since 1989," when he created the equally iconic "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" street art while a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. The sticker and graffiti campaign, born out of the skateboarding scene, gave rise to his Obey empire, and was intended as "an experiment in phenomenology" (which, per his website, "attempts to enable people to see clearly something that is right before their eyes but obscured; things that are so taken for granted that they are muted by abstract observation").

Andre the Giant didn't necessarily mean anything, Fairey often explained; indeed, his website notes that it was intended "only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker." But in a 2016 interview with The Creative Independent, Fairey spoke about the genesis of HOPE – and about "the optimism people felt about Obama, including me" – and how that aligned with the Obey ideology.

"I'm proud of the HOPE poster as a tool of grassroots activism, but I think it's equally important for people to know about my Obey campaign and its aim to encourage people to question everything they are inundated with," he told writer Brandon Stosuy. "HOPE was a very sincere endorsement, but when people know my Obey campaign, they have a better perspective on my overall philosophy to question things and therefore, they might understand that my sincere endorsement of Obama was based on a genuine and rigorous analysis of his policy positions."

The HOPE image became one of the most imitated, parodied and coopted paintings of the 21st century. By the time Fairey turned up as himself in The Simpsons' 2012 episode "Exit Through the Kwik-E-Mart," the Andre the Giant and Obama images had become commingled into a single graphic: Bart Simpson's rendering of Homer as "DOPE."

In 2011, Fairey revisited the work on behalf of the Occupy movement, replacing Obama's head with a hooded figure wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, beneath which he wrote, "Mister President, We HOPE You're On Our Side." One year after that, Fairey, in support of campaign-finance reform, offered his own disillusioned spin on HOPE with his rendering of an anonymous politician holding a fistful of cash above the word "SOLD."

Yet time and distance cannot wring the power or meaning from the original work; it remains what former National Portrait Gallery Director Martin Sullivan once called "an emblem of a significant election, as well as a new presidency." And, as the artist proved time and again, much, much more.