Josh MacPhee is an artist, curator, and activist living in Brooklyn, New York.
17 Facts About Josh MacPhee
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Originally from Holliston, Massachusetts, MacPhee was influenced at an early age by the work of Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper.
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Josh MacPhee attended Oberlin College and studied media and culture while publishing the zine Fenceclimber.
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Josh MacPhee returned to Oberlin in 1994 and graduated in 1996, continuing his prison reform work on campus.
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In 2001, Josh MacPhee co-organized the Department of Space and Land Reclamation in Chicago with Emily Forman and Nato Thompson.
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Josh MacPhee participated in "Rising Up", an exhibition with Rankin Renwick at Tollbooth Gallery, and Toby Room in 2004 with the project Celebrate People's History that featured wheatpaste art along with experimental video in public spaces, and included work by Cristy Road, Sabrina Jones, Carrie Moyer, Laura Whitehorn, David Lester, and Eric Drooker.
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Josh MacPhee is featured in the film Creative Violation: the rebel art of the street stencil.
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Josh MacPhee served as the juror for the Third Coast National in 2008, an exhibition of eclectic artworks by artists from across the United States at K Space Contemporary in Corpus Christi, Texas.
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Josh MacPhee spent eight years as an artist and activist in Chicago, Illinois, where he established a distribution system called Justseeds in order to get more radical art projects out to the public.
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At its inception in 1999, Justseeds primarily functioned as a mail order system offering art by Josh MacPhee; now the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative is a cooperative of 25 like-minded artists.
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Josh MacPhee was a member of the artist collaborative Spectres of Liberty with Olivia Robinson and Dara Greenwald, which used an inflatable reproduction of the Liberty Street Church to examine, spread awareness of, and create dialogue around the history of slavery and abolition in the United States.
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Josh MacPhee played a role in Occuprint, a group of volunteers who came together to curate and produce graphics for use in Occupy protests.
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Josh MacPhee was curator of the politically charged printmaking exhibition, Paper Politics, which toured North America beginning in Chicago in 2004.
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In 2017, Josh MacPhee curated Commonwealth: Water for all at the Queens Museum, focusing on crises in water management around the globe.
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Josh MacPhee was one of the cofounders of Interference Archive.
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Josh MacPhee has published Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture with Alec Dunn since 2010.
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In 2019, Josh MacPhee published a compendium of information about political music and radical cultural production which focused on vinyl records and the labels that released.