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Josh MacPhee | |
|---|---|
| Born | |
| Education | Oberlin College |
| Occupation(s) | Artist, Curator, Stonemason |
Josh MacPhee is an artist, curator, stonemason and activist living in Brooklyn, New York. [1]
Josh MacPhee's work as a socially-engaged artist and designer focuses on the production and distribution of political graphics. Originally from Holliston, Massachusetts, MacPhee was influenced at an early age by the work of Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper. [2] He attended Oberlin College and studied media and culture while publishing the zine Fenceclimber. After two years at Oberlin, MacPhee moved to Washington, D.C. where he helped create a community space called Beehive and collaborated on founding the D.C. chapter of the Anarchist Black Cross Network as part of MacPhee's broader burgeoning involvement in prison reform. [2] MacPhee returned to Oberlin in 1994 and graduated in 1996, continuing his prison reform work on campus. Following graduation, he moved to Boulder, Colorado, for a year to work with the Prison Rights Project before moving to Chicago. [2]
His work against mass incarceration has continued, including a major 2013 public transit and commuter train design campaign with Philadelphia Mural Arts [3] as well as design campaigns with the Close Rikers campaign. [4]
In 2001, MacPhee co-organized the Department of Space and Land Reclamation in Chicago with Emily Forman and Nato Thompson. He also participated in "Rising Up", an exhibition with Vanessa 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. [5] [6] As part of the God Bless Graffiti Coalition, he collected and exhibited the work of 275 graffiti artists from around the world; some of this material was later made available in a box set. [7] [8]
MacPhee is featured in the film Creative Violation: the rebel art of the street stencil. [9] [10]
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. [11] [12] [13] In 2019, MacPhee served as a juror for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in the printmaking category. [14]
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. [15] At its inception in 1999, Justseeds primarily functioned as a mail order system offering art by MacPhee; now the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative is a cooperative of 25 like-minded artists.
The Celebrate People's History poster series originated during MacPhee's tenure in Chicago, and has become an ongoing project with the participation of artists from around the globe who create posters highlighting the contributions of important radical figures and events. [2] The first poster in the series depicted Malcolm X, followed by a poster of John Brown. [16] These are produced as educational materials and distributed inexpensively as a teaching tool on radical history. [17] By 2018, over 100 designs had been printed in the series, with over 300,000 posters distributed, and an exhibition featuring selections from this project was mounted at the Brush Gallery at St. Lawrence University. [18] [19]
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. [20] [21] [22] Their work as a collective was featured in volume 13 of Aspect Magazine. [23]
As one of the first artists to respond to the Occupy Wall Street protests with artwork, MacPhee built on Adbusters's use of the image of the Charging Bull of Wall Street to make it a popular visual representation of the Occupy movement's focus on capitalism's destructive tendencies. His "Money Talks Too Much" poster featuring the charging bull was reproduced as a sign for protesters to carry at marches. [24] MacPhee played a role in Occuprint, a group of volunteers who came together to curate and produce graphics for use in Occupy protests. [25] The work of Occuprint focused on curating submissions of graphic material and making them available through a website, for reproduction around the world, thereby cultivating a network of graphic design material to be used as an organizing tool for Occupy movements worldwide. [26]
MacPhee was curator of the politically charged printmaking exhibition, Paper Politics, which toured North America beginning in Chicago in 2004. [27] It included an international group of approximately 200 artists including Sue Coe, Swoon, Sixten, Dara Greenwald, Tyler Kline, Meredith Stern and Meek, and focused on a broad range of political issues including peace, justice, social equity, and the environment; [28] many works responded very directly to the war in Iraq. [29] Various mediums were included in the show, including screenprint, stencil, and linocut. [28] Every piece in the exhibition was printed by hand. [30] Subsequent installation locations included 5+5 Gallery in Brooklyn, NY (2005-2006), [31] Milwaukee (2006), Dowd Gallery at SUNY Cortland (September–October 2008), [32] [29] the Red House in Syracuse, NY (December 2008), [33] Ghostprint Gallery in Richmond, VA (August 2009), [34] [35] West Central Illinois Arts Center (March–April 2010), [36] and Space gallery in Pittsburgh, PA (August, 2010). [27]
In 2008 he co-curated the exhibition Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960's to Now with Dara Greenwald. [37] [38] This exhibition focused on material produced by activist movements around the world. [39]
In 2017, MacPhee curated Commonwealth: Water for all at the Queens Museum, focusing on crises in water management around the globe. [40] Exhibition material highlighted protests in response to the 2016 proposal of the Dakota Access Pipeline, including a series of prints from the Justseeds Artists Cooperative, and was presented alongside the museum's panorama of New York City. [41]
Josh MacPhee was one of the cofounders of Interference Archive. [42] This organization focuses on the intersection of social movements and cultural production, illustrating the history of social movement organizing through access to and display of cultural ephemera. [43] MacPhee's personal collection of social movement publications, graphic material produced for organizing, and punk and DIY material culture, served as a major part of the original collection of Interference Archive alongside the collection of Dara Greenwald. [39] [44]
MacPhee has published Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture (PM Press) with Alec Dunn since 2010. [45] This ongoing series shares and provides commentary on political graphics, with full-color reproductions of a wide variety of graphic material. [46]
Pound the Pavement is a zine series featuring a variety of topics often related broadly, but not exclusively to street art and graffiti.[ citation needed ]
In 2019, MacPhee published a compendium of information about political music and radical cultural production which focused on vinyl records and the labels that released. [47]
Graffiti is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written words to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire.
Sticker art is a form of street art in which an image or message is publicly displayed using stickers. These stickers may promote a political agenda, comment on a policy or issue, or comprise a subcategory of graffiti.
The Tollbooth Gallery was a site-specific exhibition space and project of the nonprofit arts organization ArtRod launched in 2003 and located in Tacoma, Washington. The project featured contemporary art on view 24 hours a day and seven days a week. The aim of the Tollbooth was to offer dynamic and challenging installation and video art in an outdoor urban setting. Tollbooth Gallery was created and curated by Jared Pappas-Kelley and Michael Lent.
Street art is visual art created in public locations for public visibility. It has been associated with the terms "independent art", "post-graffiti", "neo-graffiti" and guerrilla art.
The Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) is a United States non-profit, educational and research archive that collects, preserves, documents, and circulates domestic and international political posters relating to historical and contemporary movements for social change. From its base in Los Angeles, California, CSPG organizes travelling exhibitions, lectures, and workshops, and publishes educational material. Their website also hosts virtual exhibitions.
Meek is a notable street artist operating out of Melbourne, Australia, and specialising in the subgenre of stencil graffiti.
Dean Stockton, better known by his alias D*Face, is an English multimedia street artist who uses spray paint, stickers, posters, and stencils.
Melbourne, the capital of Victoria and the second largest city in Australia, has gained international acclaim for its diverse range of street art and associated subcultures. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, much of the city's disaffected youth were influenced by the graffiti of New York City, which subsequently became popular in Melbourne's inner suburbs, and along suburban railway and tram lines.
Blek le Rat is a French graffiti artist. He was one of the first graffiti artists in Paris, and has been described as the "Father of stencil graffiti".
The Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University is the contemporary art gallery of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Meredith Stern is an artist, musician and disc jockey living in Providence, Rhode Island.
Justseeds Artists' Cooperative is a worker-owned cooperative of 30 North American artists, founded in 1998. Justseeds members primarily produce handmade prints and publications, which are distributed through their website and at events related to social and environmental movements. Members also work individually as graphic designers for and within a broad swath of social and environmental activist causes in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. As a collective body, Justseeds has produced several gallery exhibitions of both print work and collaborative sculptural installation.
Patrick Thomas is an English-born graphic artist. He has illustrated book reviews and opinion pieces in The New York Times. Thomas was born in Liverpool in 1965, and lives in Berlin.
Melanie Cervantes is a Xicana artist and activist based in the Bay Area.
Dara Greenwald (1971–2012) was an interdisciplinary artist with a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and a BA in Women's Studies from Oberlin College. Her collaborative work involved video, writing, public art, activism and cultural organizing.
Interference Archive is a volunteer-run library, gallery, and archive of historical materials related to social and political activism and movements. Located in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, at 314 7th Street, with in the zip code 11215, its mission is "to explore the relationship between cultural production and social movements."
Erik Ruin is a visual and theatrical artist living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Known for his use of papercuttings, printmaking, and shadow puppetry to convey political themes, Ruin's distinctive style has appeared in several books, art exhibitions, and as a featured member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative.
Jeremy Novy is an American street artist and stencil artist. He is best known for his stencils of koi fish and efforts in support of gay activism. His work has been featured in numerous publications, including SF Weekly, the Wisconsin Gazette and Missionlocal.org. In 2008, Novy was the recipient of the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts grant. Novy is California-based.
Wendy Murray, is a visual artist and arts educator, formerly known as Mini Graff. Under her former persona, Murray worked as an urban street-poster artist between 2003 and 2010, working in and around Sydney's urban fringe. Since 2014, Murray's art expanded into traditional forms of drawing and artist book design, whilst still engaging with social and political issues through poster-making. Murray's use of letraset transfers, accompanied with vibrant colours and fluorescent inks, references the work of studios from the 1960s through to the 1980s, including the community-based Earthworks Poster Collective and Redback Graphix. A 2018 collaboration with The Urban Crew, a 17-person collective of socially engaged geographers, planners, political scientists and sociologists, resulted in the Sydney – We Need to Talk! artist book, addressing issues of development, transport congestion, housing affordability and commercialisation of public space.
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