ArtistsJosh MacPhee
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Josh MacPhee is a Brooklyn based street artist, designer, curator, and activist. A street stenciler and poster maker for over a decade, he also runs a radical art distribution project, justseeds.org, as a way to develop and distribute t-shirts, posters, and stickers with revolutionary content. He organizes the Celebrate People's History Poster Project, an ongoing poster series in which different artists create posters to document and remember moments in radical history.
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COMING JUNE 2010
Signal 01: A Journal of International Political Graphics
Edited by Josh MacPhee and Alec Icky Dunn
Published: June 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60486-091-7
Format: Paperback
Page Count: 128
Dimensions: 8 by 5
Subjects: Art, Politics, History
$14.95
Signal is an ongoing book series dedicated to documenting and sharing compelling graphics, art projects, and cultural movements of international resistance and liberation struggles. Artists and cultural workers have been at the center of upheavals and revolts the world over, from the painters and poets in the Paris Commune to the poster makers and street theatre performers of the recent counter globalization movement. Signal will bring these artists and their work to a new audience, digging deep through our common history to unearth their images and stories. We have no doubt that Signal will come to serve as a unique and irreplaceable resource for activist artists and academic researchers, as well as an active forum for critique of the role of art in revolution.
In the US there is a tendency to focus only on the artworks produced within our shores or from English speaking producers. Signal reaches beyond those bounds, bringing material produced the world over, translated from dozens of languages and collected from both the present and decades past. Although a full color printed publication, Signal is not limited to the graphic arts. Within its pages you will find political posters and fine arts, comics and murals, street art, site specific works, zines, art collectives, documentation of performance and articles on the often overlooked but essential role all of these have played in struggles around the world.
Signal 01 will include:
- Red Rat and Dutch Squatter Comics
- The Future of Xicana Poster Making: An Interview with Taller Tupac Amaru
- Adventure Playgrounds: A Photo Essay
- Propaganda Brigades in Mexico 1968: The Graphic Production of a Movement
- Incite!: Photomontage and Revolt in the Early 80s
- Designing Anarchy: the Graphic Covers of Rufus Segar
- The Political Freight Train Graffiti of Impeach
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Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today
by Josh MacPhee
Published: October 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60486-090-0
Format: Paperback
Page Count: 144
Dimensions: 9 by 6
Subjects: Art/Politics
$24.95
Paper Politics presents a breathtaking tour of the many modalities of printing by hand: relief, intaglio, lithography, serigraph, collagraph, monotype, and photography. In addition to these techniques, included are more traditional media used to convey political thought, finely crafted stencils and silk-screens intended for wheat pasting in the street. Artists range from the well established (Sue Coe, Swoon, Carlos Cortez) to the up-and-coming (Favianna Rodriguez, Chris Stain, Nicole Schulman), from street artists (BORF, You Are Beautiful) to rock poster makers (EMEK, Bughouse).
For excerpts from the book, click here
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What others are saying...
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Interview with Josh MacPhee
ZNet
Art and culture are always tricky things.
While they have existed as the backbone of many social struggles throughout history, when you actually try to quantify their effects, they often slip through your hands.
I hope Paper Politics further convinces both artists/designers and political-engaged people that the space where these two worlds overlap is not a marginal one, but central to how we understand and interpret our world.
Printmaking as Resistance?
By Eric Triantafillou
Brooklyn Rail
May 2010
Grace à Josh MacPhee. His latest book Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today (PM Press), is a treasure trove of prints expressing a wide range of social and political sentiments from do-it-yourself printmakers in the U.S. and abroad. It is also a window through which one can begin to see, from the standpoint of Left artists, some of the problems that arise when attempting to construct radical politics from everyday art practices.
Read more | Buy book now | Download e-book now | Back to reviews | Back to topPaper Politics is for those who recognize that both art and politics are about communication and also about community. As much as it is a collection of individual artists’ prints, the project has proven itself to be a successful exercise in large scale organization. Josh MacPhee writes about the project’s intent, “…a community of printmakers and a more specific audience for our work than the existing ‘anyone that happens to see it on the street’.” Proof of that intent’s success is that a couple dozen of the artists involved with the exhibits went on to become members of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, an artist-owned and –run collective and online gallery. Over the years of the traveling exhibit, artists and audiences have met face to face and wound up building more long-term relationships than a passing glimpse of a wheat pasted poster on the street could ever provide.
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MacPhee, Josh and Eric Reuland, eds. Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority. Oakland: AK Press, 2007.
MacPhee, Josh and Favianna Rodriguez, eds. Reproduce and Revolt! New York: Soft Skull Press, 2008.
MacPhee, Josh. Stencil Pirates. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004.
