By Patrick Hedlund
DNAinfo News Editor
MANHATTAN — The baby featured on the cover of Nirvana’s iconic “Nevermind” album is all grown up — and working for street artist Shepard Fairey.
The now-19-year-old, Spencer Elden, recently did an interview explaining how he wound up swimming naked on the cover of the seminal 1991 album.
“It’s kind of a fun fact about me, I guess,” he said. “Everyone out there in the world has seen my penis already, or my baby penis.”
Elden’s parents were in art school at the time, and a photographer friend asked if they would be willing to volunteer their infant for an underwater shoot.
“I was just born, so they went down to the local pool and threw me in the drink,” he said. “A couple of months later, they were driving down the road and they were like, ‘Hey look — there’s my baby on a billboard!’”
Elden, an artist himself, described working for Fairey — who’s been getting tons of attention for new work on E. Houston St. and an accompanying art show at Deitch Projects — as “pretty awesome” and “a lot of fun.”
“He’s a very nice guy, very inspiring, very hard worker,” he said of Fairey. “It’s all him and he does it all himself, and it’s just very mind-opening when you find out that it’s all his hard work that went into to it that makes it what it is.”
