Building mpl on OSX has proven to be a nightmare because of all the different types of zlib, png and freetype that may be on your system. The recommended and supported way to build is to use a third-party package manager to install the required dependencies, and then install matplotlib from source using the setup.py script. Two widely used package managers are homebrew and MacPorts. The following example illustrates how to install libpng and freetype using homebrew. Example usage:: brew install libpng freetype If you are using MacPorts, execute the following instead: Example usage:: port install libpng freetype To install matplotlib from source, execute: Example usage:: python setup.py install