E-Mail This Article to a Friend DEPT. OF PUBLIC ART Street stencils BY CAMILLE DODERO

Never let it be said that an angry kid with a can of spray paint can do no good. In 1993, a disaffected young radical from Holliston named Josh MacPhee was living in Washington, DC, when a group of neo-Nazis scrawled swastikas and SS lightning bolts all over the capital city. So MacPhee — an anarchist punk who’d dabbled in stencil-painting before — hit the streets with a buddy to cover up the racist symbols: they turned the squiggly bolts into the band name KISS and then stenciled the makeup-bedecked faces of Gene Simmons and his rock comrades over the swastikas. In the course of a few twilight trips, they’d turned the neo-Nazis’ menacing territorial pissings into satirical insignia for a comical army. And soon after, the Nazi graffiti stopped.

Now in his " third decade of life, " MacPhee has been coating the cityscape with politically loaded images for more than a decade. By now, the Chicago resident estimates that he’s hand-cut thousands of stencils and painted even more — everything from gas masks to multicolored slingshots to real-estate developers caricatured as necktied junkie zombies. He’s also spent the last decade photographing others’ work, a collection he compiled into the soon-to-be-released Stencil Pirates (Soft Skull Press), a compendium of nearly 1000 stencils.

This Saturday afternoon, MacPhee brings his X-Acto knife and manila file folders to the Lucy Parsons Center to give a hands-on stencil demonstration. From his Chicago residence, MacPhee spoke with the Phoenix about his work in street semiotics.

Q: How’d you first get into stencils?

A: I got involved in stenciling when I was in high school, which was over a dozen years ago. I’d go into Boston for hardcore shows, punk shows on the weekends. I don’t even necessarily remember seeing stencils in Boston as much as I came across World War 3 Illustrated there, which is this political comic out of New York that included the work of radical artists who all did stencils. And it really appealed to me.

Q: In the book, you include pictures of your work. In the past, police have targeted graffiti writers after their books have been published. Any worries about legal issues?

A: Generally, you need to be caught in the act. I’m getting on in years and I’m not as active as I used to be, so the likelihood of me getting caught in the act is fairly slim — there aren’t that many acts anymore.

That might be a little different when it comes to traditional graffiti, though, because you have a name and you repeat it over and over and over again. You have a hand style that’s a signature. [The police] can fairly easily attempt to prove that you’re responsible. But a stencil is infinitely reproducible.... Also, stenciling isn’t on the radar as much as [traditional graffiti-writing] for the police. It causes less damage, people have an ambivalent relationship to it. And until recently, 99 percent of it wasn’t signed. So even if the police were going to come after me, how would they prove I did those pieces? My name isn’t on any of them.

Besides, the times that I’ve been caught —

Q: How many times have you been caught?

A: Oh, a couple. I’ve been fairly lucky in my day.

Q: Were you convicted?

A: I’ve never actually been found guilty of anything. I’ve gone to court and the cops don’t show up. Which, in Chicago, is not going to happen if I was a 17-year-old Puerto Rican kid.

Q: How have your stencils evolved over the years?

A: I started stenciling when I was a 17-year-old anarchist kid pissed off at the world. The first Gulf War was happening and everything seemed real messed up. And in that [teenage] way — which is sort of naive and endearing and truthful — I thought that I knew better than the rest of the world. So I was going to tell everyone what I knew.

I’m at a really different point now. My work is really different. I would be a lot less likely to stencil STOP WAR. Not that I’m against that or think it’s ineffective to be so didactic. Trying to affect the visual dialogue, I think, is really, really important — so I’m really glad people are out there painting STOP WAR. But personally, I’m more interested in poetic or critical-thinking stencils, stencils that don’t tell people what to think, but encourage them to think. Because I don’t want to live in a world where I tell everyone what to think — but I do want to live in a world where everyone thinks about what they do.

Josh MacPhee will conduct a hands-on stenciling workshop on Saturday, July 3, at 5 p.m., at the Lucy Parsons Center, 549 Columbus Avenue, in Boston, with graphic novelist Nate Powell. Call (617) 267-6272.