Originally from Holliston, Massachusetts, MacPhee was influenced at an early age by the work of Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper.
He also participated in "Rising Up", an exhibition with Rankin Renwick (then known as 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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.