SAN FRANCISCO - The code word was "chill." That's what the crew with Shepard Fairey, the cult graphic artist known for his screen prints and stickers of the wrestler Andre the Giant, had been instructed to say if a police car rolled by as Fairey was wheat-pasting one recent night here, illegally tagging warehouse walls and empty billboards with his black-and-white images. Then Fairey and his helpers would know to make a run for it, to avoid yet another arrest.

But the law is not much of a deterrent for a self-styled populist culture jammer. Fairey had already spent nearly a week bombing the city's streets. By midnight he and his crew of a half-dozen 20-something guys, most employees at Obey Giant, his company in Los Angeles, had finished prepping for another all-night run at the White Walls Gallery here, where Fairey's solo show, "The Duality of Humanity," ran earlier this month.

Dressed in torn jeans (Fairey) and hoodies (everybody), they packed up supplies -- buckets of paste, scissors, rope, video camera -- and gathered the art: 10-foot-long photocopies of Fairey's work, neatly snipped in half. Then they piled into a rented minivan -- "No one suspects a minivan," said Derek Millner, the videographer -- and went looking for real estate. They drove by one of Fairey's Barack Obama posters, put up two nights before in a parking lot. It was already defaced -- the "pe" in the slogan "Hope" had been torn off.

"Everything gets messed with," Fairey said, using language more appropriate for a guerrilla graffitist. "It's just the nature of street art. You can't be too precious about it."

Fairey, a boyish 38, occupies a rare position for an artist. A star in the world of street art for nearly two decades (the Andre stickers earned him an A on an assignment at the Rhode Island School of Design), he has parlayed his stark imagery and indie cred into a successful design and marketing company with corporate clients such as Pepsi. His "Obey" images and slogans appear on T-shirts sold at Urban Outfitters, and he has created logos for the likes of Kobe Bryant.

[Those who were living in Raleigh, N.C., a decade ago might recall his visit. Fairey caused a stir when he slapping his posters -- including Andre the Giant and "Obey" images -- around town, guerilla-style. He was in Raleigh for a gallery show at the time, and his works have been exhibited elsewhere in the Triangle since then.]

This year Fairey has earned a new level of mainstream attention because of the much distributed and copied Obama poster, highly visible at the Democratic National Convention in Denver and, as a T-shirt or accessory, on a liberal body near you.

The White Walls show, his third and largest, sold out before it opened, with some pieces going for as much as $85,000. (On obeygiant.com, his prints go for about $20 to $45; studio pieces are normally around $20,000.) He also has a new book, "E Pluribus Venom," of work from his 2007 exhibition in New York, and in February the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston will host his first solo museum show, "Supply and Demand."

Through it all, he continues to scale fences and clamber atop buildings to put up purposefully simplistic, propagandistic images (his crew members serve as spotters and second hands).

This despite changes in his health (he is diabetic, and wears an insulin drip under his shirt), family status -- he is married with two young daughters -- and the continued arrests.

His 14th (or 15th, "if you count a brief detention in Japan," he said, where he was asked to write a note of apology) came when he was wheat-pasting in an alley near the Denver convention center. Because the charge usually amounts to a misdemeanor, which is expunged after six months, Fairey typically pleads guilty and pays a fine. "My time's too valuable to go back to court and fight," he said.

Still, Fairey draws scorn from underground artists who think he's too marketable and critics who say he's too watered-down. Reviewing "E Pluribus Venom" at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery, Benjamin Genocchio wrote in The New York Times that "the imagery comes off as generic." He added, "It's Norman Rockwell crossed with the Dead Kennedys crossed with Communist-era propaganda."

Andrew Michael Ford, director of Ad Hoc Art, a Brooklyn gallery that specializes in pieces by street artists, said, "People will say he's doing something that seems very commercial." He noted that though he was a fan, Fairey seemed particularly ripe for criticism because he makes money from socially and politically charged work. "It doesn't seem to match up in people's minds," Ford said.

Last year Fairey's street art in New York was defaced by the Splasher, a paint-slinging detractor, and a pamphlet deploring the commercialization of the art world was distributed by an unknown group at a reception for "E Pluribus Venom."

Fairey had printed his own money for that show -- "Indiscriminate Capitalism," it reads on one side, and "Never Bow to the System/Change the System/Or Create Your Own" on the other -- and says that like many pop artists he has always toyed with ideas of commercialism, advertising and appropriation.

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