Bill Mackey is an artist, an architect, and an illustrator. His work explores the human connection to built and natural environments and offers a fresh perspective on our relationship with place, history, and culture. Through humor, ethnographic research, color, and language, Bill creates collages, field guides, signs, maps, and pictorial landscapes that question our roles as consumers and creators of culture. The work specifically addresses issues of density, post-World War II development, and the automobile and its impact on our land and culture.

Bill Mackey was born in 1969 in Lansing, Michigan. He received degrees from the University of Illinois (BS Architectural Studies 1991) and the University of Arizona (B.Arch and M.Arch 1994) with a primary focus on the social construction of space. His art has shown in galleries in Chicago and Tucson, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, the University of Arizona, and the Tucson-Pima Public Library. His illustrations are in the New Yorker, the Journal of Creative Geography, SELECT Media, Proximity Magazine and the Lumpen Times. Annually, he produces work for the Version Festival, a multi-media event held in Chicago. In 2007/2008, he created a new “branding” package for VyandElle, a company that produces bags from recycled billboard material. He has practiced architecture since 1995 – designing landscapes, residences, educational facilities, recreation and community centers, court facilities, historic preservation projects, master plans, offices, restaurants, and retail space.

In 1995, he created Worker, Inc., a company that specializes in promoting change in the built environment. In 2007, he formed the Neighborhood Residents Resources Ethnography Studies Unit, a division of Worker, Inc., to understand local physical environments on a scientific level. In 2007, he co-found the design co*op, a group of designers and architects with the expressed mission that the built environment should improve the quality of life for all. Since its inception, the design co*op, has facilitated sessions with the general public and school groups addressing issues of density, public space, and public art. He currently lives in Tucson, Arizona practicing architecture and art production. He will be the Architect-in-Residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson in 2010.