Josh Macphee

Josh MacPhee is a Chicago based artist/activist involved in a number of varied projects and practices. For the past decade in Chicago, he has been reaching audiences through many forms of street art, including spraypaint stencils and wheatpasted posters. Macphee is also a self-appointed documentarian of all forms of public expression by others, from traditional graffiti to altered stop signs to marker scrawls on corporate advertisements. With this documentation he has put together small and inexpensive artist books/zines and is currently working on a book about spraypaint stencils called Stencil Pirates that will be published in March, 2004 on Soft Skull Press. Macphee also runs a graphic arts project called justseeds to develop and distribute t-shirts, posters and other agit-prop, such as the Celebrate People's History Poster Series, a collection of 2-color offset posters celebrating people and events that are rarely taught in schools. In addition to more traditional graphic work, Macphee also helps organize tactic media actions, and radical cultural activities in artist collectives and ad-hoc artist groups. These have included weekends of public cultural action called the Department of Space and Land Reclamation (DSLR) and Autonomous Territories of Chicago as well as working with the artist collective Street.Rec. 

Contact: P.O.Box 476971, Chicago, IL 60647 USA, josh@justseeds.org