Latest news with #SilenceDogood
Boston Globe
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
It may be a silent protest, but the message is loud and clear. And ‘temporary graffiti' is building a following.
'I'm coming to Boston, I'm bringing hell with me,' Homan In early March, on the night before Mayor Michelle Wu was due in Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress about the city's immigration policies, a group of activists had an answer for Homan. Advertisement 'You can't bring hell to Boston,' the artists projected in vintage typeface on the brick facade of the Old State House. 'It's been waiting for you since 1770.' Photographic evidence of the temporary installation quickly made the internet rounds. Get Love Letters: The Newsletter A weekly dispatch with all the best relationship content and commentary – plus exclusive content for fans of Love Letters, Dinner With Cupid, weddings, therapy talk, and more. Enter Email Sign Up The Silence Dogood display at the Old State House. Handout Not by happenstance, that day was the anniversary of the skirmish that came to be known as the Boston Massacre, when the colonists' disagreements with the British Parliament and King George III's occupying troops boiled over into deadly violence. That kind of link to this city's revolutionary past is what drives the folks behind Advertisement The group borrowed the name from the Boston native Benjamin Franklin, who used it as an alias early in his illustrious life. At 16, while apprenticing at his older brother's print shop, Franklin adopted the pen name after James Franklin declined to print his young sibling's letters in his weekly newspaper, the New-England Courant. A display on Old North Church. Aram Boghosian Benjamin Franklin imagined his alter ego to be a middle-aged widow, a defender of 'the Rights and Liberties of my Country' and 'a mortal Enemy to arbitrary Government & unlimited Power.' Silence is 'a bit of a busybody,' explained Diane Dwyer, who has become the default spokesperson for the Silence Dogood project. On a recent Friday afternoon, Dwyer sat in a shared artist space on the second floor of an old brick building in the Fort Point district. Scale models covered most flat surfaces; artists' renderings were pinned up across much of the available wall space. A display in Boston Harbor. Handout Dwyer, who grew up in Maryland, moved to Boston a few years ago, after earning a master's degree in narrative environments from the University of the Arts London. She has a background in theater, 'and I'm a huge history nerd,' she said. She was recently named a grant recipient of the Mayor's Office of Arts & Culture's 'We're inviting people to write their own plaques,' Dwyer said. While she's currently compiling a database of Boston's existing markers — and noting the overwhelming prevalence of white men (there are, she says, as many references to Paul Revere as all women combined, and more than all Black people) — she still gets excited about making connections to the country's founding fathers. Advertisement A display on Faneuil Hall. Handout Silence Dogood's projections have featured statements attributed to George Washington ('The cause of Boston now is and always will be the cause of America,' projected in the water at the base of the Boston Tea Party Museum), Joseph Warren ('May our land be a land of liberty,' at the Bunker Hill Monument, on the site where Warren was killed), and, yes, the aforementioned silversmith Revere ('One if by land, two if by D.C.,' projected on the Old North Church, though that's not a direct quote). Silence Dogood's work at Old North Church on April 17, 2025. Mike Ritter The Rev. Dr. Matthew Cadwell, the vicar at Old North Church, didn't know about those projections until he saw them on 'The Rachel Maddow Show.' Silence Dogood's warning came during a busy week for the church, which doubles as an active Episcopal mission and a historical site. It was the 250th anniversary of Revere's famous ride. One of the projections borrowed from the last stanza of 'In the main, people were very enthusiastic about it,' Cadwell said over the phone. 'It was neat. It was a powerful capstone on that night of historic remembrance.' To stage the Silence Dogood protests, Dwyer borrows state-of-the-art projection equipment — and sometimes enlists production help — from the small circle of Boston creatives who specialize in outdoor art. At one 'activation,' an unexpected hailstorm sent volunteers scrambling to cover the expensive projector with their jackets. Advertisement Visual artists Jeff Grantz and Diane Dwyer are part of a grassroots group that uses high-powered projectors to beam protest messages on the facades of Boston historical buildings, reminding people of connections between Boston's revolutionary history and the present day. Ken McGagh for The Boston Globe In recent years, projection-mapping artists have fine-tuned the art of 'temporary graffiti.' Some say the practice of projection mapping as a form of protest took off during the Occupy demonstrations of 2011. During the first Trump administration, Another group, In Boston during the racial reckoning of 2020, some of the city's projectionists partnered with street artist Cedric Douglas after the removal of a Christopher Columbus statue in the North End. They While redefining the nature of public protest, these artists have also been grappling with the unresolved debate about the legality of their protests. Some legal experts cite property rights and laws governing trespassing. Others argue that the right to free speech covers projections just as it does signs and banners. Arists Diane Dwyer and Jeff Grantz project a quotation from George Washington on the wall of a vacant Dorchester tire store on Tuesday, June 24, 2025. Ken McGagh for The Boston Globe Dwyer and her colleagues talk often about their First Amendment right to protest and the potential collateral damage to the other work they do, for advertisers, art festivals, and more. Dwyer, who heads Advertisement For her, the commitment to activist work came into sharp focus on a Friday in May, when she watched the live feed of a 'They were speaking to the coordinated resistance without hemming and hawing,' Dwyer recalled. After another period of despair, she said — 'Who can remember the headline of the day?' — the Town Hall discussion fortified her. It also made her feel, for the first time, like she'd become a bona fide Bostonian. You just hope, she said, 'that we're not screaming into the void.' James Sullivan can be reached at .
Boston Globe
03-04-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Why Boston was such a tinderbox in the 1770s
A group of artists working under the pseudonym "Silence Dogood" — the same pen name used by Benjamin Franklin — projected several messages onto the facade of the Old State House on Tuesday. Diane Dwyer The hat tip, new #rebels saluting the OGs, captured some of the come-and-get-us fury of Boston in the aftermath of the deadly 1770 riot on King Street, which Paul Revere branded a massacre. In time, the Massacre begat the Tea Party, the reaction to which propelled the Shot Heard Round the World, fired a quarter-millennium ago this month. But Boston's revolutionary ethos is far older than 1775, or 1770. And leveraging anniversaries was always part of it. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Founded by British emigrants in 1630, the town that rose on a slender peninsula jutting into Massachusetts Bay was singular from the outset. Its leaders were Protestant reformers, denigrated as 'Puritans' by their enemies. They left an England on the verge of civil war, crossing a vast and furious ocean to plant a more perfect society. John Winthrop, the lawyer who became the colony's first governor, drew on the Gospel of Matthew Advertisement Historians have long and correctly insisted that we ought not overstate the degree to which the culture of Revolutionary or even Colonial Boston remained 'Puritan.' Yet the legacy of Boston's founding continued to matter in an increasingly commercial and cosmopolitan world. It mattered demographically: Massachusetts was from the outset a family enterprise, with nearly equal numbers of men and women, who produced large broods of children, who married and multiplied across the stony soils of New England. The population grew quickly and remained disproportionately youthful, as in so many other developing economies then and since. The trading economy they created was modest but vibrant. Bostonians imported more than they sold abroad, which would matter when the taxes hit. But their prosperity, such as it was, was shared widely. They were a middling people, the rich less rich and the poor less poor than in the land they'd left behind. The Puritan 'Great Migration' to New England died in 1649, when the English Civil War ended, which meant that the generations rising thereafter did so within a relatively homogeneous society. There were blips of immigration — French Huguenots in the 1690s, Protestant Irish in the 1710s and again in the 1730s. Advertisement The streets of Boston teemed with people, for the most part, of common stock and common values. Ordinary men participated vigorously in public life, through a relatively broad electoral franchise. They imagined politics as a local affair. Elected officials at the town and Colony level knew themselves to be directly accountable to the people around them, especially on matters of the purse. At first, the Old Testament shaped Boston's laws as well as its culture: a city of steeples and jails. The colonists' reputation as a coven of killjoys was lampooned in print as early as 1637 by a freethinking lawyer expelled from the godly Commonwealth for erecting a Maypole. This perception only increased after the deadly witch trials in Salem in 1692. Yet if Puritanism bred a righteous stringency, it also nourished the skills of a self-governing people. The New England way of worship, called Congregationalism, insisted upon a direct relationship between the faithful and their God. Which meant reading the Bible, in English, at home, intensively. Literacy was a godly duty, and Massachusetts boasted some of the highest rates of it in the Western world. Mothers read the Word aloud to their sons, making the home a 'little commonwealth,' and women were people of ideas from the outset. Some of those sons went on to Advertisement Congregationalism bred printers as well as readers: The first press in British America — its type and hardware and even its paper imported — was set up in Cambridge shortly after the college was established. Advertisement A sculpture of Phillis Wheatley on The Commonwealth Avenue Mall in Boston. David L. Ryan/Globe Staff At midcentury, Bostonians were enormously proud of their Britishness. They fought and died in the Crown's great global war, now known as the Few needed the reminder. When, 13 months later, the old king died and his grandson ascended the throne as George III, the patriotic men of Harvard used their printing press to send him an unctuous congratulatory ode in schoolboy Latin. And in 1763, when the war officially ended, Boston's James Otis, Harvard class of 1743 and a prominent lawyer, told the Boston Town Meeting, 'The true interests of Great Britain and her plantations are mutual, and what God in his providence has united, let no man dare attempt to pull asunder.' Within a year, Otis would trade his hymn of praise for a protest song. The Crown's postwar tax levies punctured Bostonians' pride well before they pinched their pocketbooks. To a people used to local authority, who thought themselves exemplary Britons, the distant edicts rankled. Were these literate, liberty-loving Britons somehow lesser subjects? Their patriotism curdled, a sense of wrong feeding a culture of rights. 'A plantation or colony, is a settlement of subjects in a territory disjoined or remote from the mother country,' Otis wrote, in 1764, when the Sugar Act came into being. In the first pamphlet asserting Colonial prerogatives, he articulated a principle that would overspread the Eastern Seaboard: 'Colonists are entitled to as ample rights, liberties, and privileges as the subjects of the mother country are, and in some respects, to more .' Advertisement Benjamin Edes and John Gil, publishers of the Boston Gazette, printed Otis's pamphlet, which quickly spawned rejoinders from Caribbean writers whom the Sugar Act protected. The city's newspapers, long an engine of British patriotism, became a seedbed of American outrage. Through the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 and the military occupation of 1768 and the Massacre of 1770 and the dumping of the tea in 1773, Boston's presses kept the tide of outrage high, even when actual outrages ebbed. 'The Newspapers teemed with everything that could inflame the Passions,' complained the customs commissioner, Henry Hulton, stationed, for his sins, in Boston. The passion was the point. And by the time a Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774, pamphleteers like Otis and pressmen like Edes and Gil had done a great deal to make the plight of Boston a matter of urgent continent-wide concern. 'Every Scrap of Letter or Newspaper from Boston is read here,' The delegates were right to worry. For as the 2025 artists' collective said — artists who called themselves Silence Dogood — hell had been waiting here all along.
Boston Globe
05-03-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Artists project message against ‘tyranny' on Old State House in wake of Michelle Wu's testimony on Capitol Hill
Advertisement Wu's appearance before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday, her first time testifying before Congress, saw some testy exchanges with Republican lawmakers, though the mayor . Another message, Related : The Old State House was chosen specifically for its association with the Boston Massacre, Dwyer said. Wednesday is the 255th anniversary of the massacre. Working under the name Silence Dogood, In a statement, 'Silence Dogood' said that Boston's commitment to liberty and opposition to tyranny has 'remained eternal' since the age of the American Revolution. A message projected onto the Old State House referenced Trump border czar Tom Homan's comments on "bringing hell" to Boston over its immigration enforcement. Diane Dwyer 'Our residents have long stood against injustice and taken action to right it,' the group said. The group also quoted founding father Samuel Adams of Boston, who wrote in 1780 that if ever 'vain and aspiring men' take power in the US, 'our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.' 'Those most experienced patriots are Bostonians,' the group said in the statement. 'To all who call Boston home: you belong here. To all who question our 'eternal enmity to tyranny,' read a history book.' Advertisement Camilo Fonseca can be reached at
