Mass Humanities’ Katherine Stevens talks with Diane Dwyer, Experience Director at Illuminus, about the Silence Dogood project’s upcoming art installations and community discussions during the 250th.
Katherine Stevens (KS): I think we just want to start with you saying a little bit about who you are and then who Silence Dogood is.
Diane Dwyer (DD): Who am I? I guess I’m a history nerd who turned into an artist, maybe. I grew up in Maryland, and I somehow–you know, how kids become really obsessed with a random thing for no apparent reason?–for me, it was early American history. And I was sure I was going to grow up to be an archeologist. And I spent my summers, as a living history interpreter at a farm museum in Virginia, portraying tenant farming in 1771.
And, at some point, I had a bad history teacher in high school, and it sent me to art school instead. And, I was interested, I think, as both a kid and a young adult, I was interested in this sort of storytelling and place and, so I went into production design for theater and worked in theme park design for a little while, before going back to grad school and getting a master’s degree in a course called Narrative Environments.
And sort of finding my history roots again, a little bit, and in installation art that responded to site specific history.
KS: So can you talk about who Silence Dogood is or what Silence Dogood is?
DD: The first letter was published today, April 2nd, in 1722. The first appearance of Silence Dogood. To-date, the project has been guerrilla-style projection mapping of historical quotes and contemporary commentary at historic sites around Greater Boston that address both sort of this commemorative 250th moment and also the forces of tyranny and oppression that have either sort of come back into the national sphere or have always been here.
KS: Can you share how you chose the name Silence Dogood?
DD: I didn’t overthink it. The first projection or installation that I did in this project was very spontaneous. It was March 5 last year, right before Mayor Wu testified to Congress about being a sanctuary city and after the “border czar” had said he was going to bring hell to Boston. And it was also the anniversary of the Boston Massacre.
And so it was a very sort of impulsive installation that has grown. And I used the name Silence Dogood because I knew it was a pseudonym that Benjamin Franklin used when he was living in Boston. And he wrote about, he sort of poked fun at established powers and sort of called into question women’s rights. It was satirical, but he was questioning power dynamics. And I thought it sort of fit perfectly…it’s a silent art form, projection. And, it aims to do good.
KS: What does projection look like? What do people experience?
DD: We use big, bright projectors. They’re the same as you would find in a classroom or a conference room, but bigger and brighter. We go out into the city and we use software that can map a surface or map a building. We shine the projector at the building, and then we can distort our content to fit onto a building. So it’s light and it’s text in a site specific location. So, it’s a way to have buildings sort of speak for themselves.
KS: I think this is a really challenging time for a lot of people, with a lot of frustration or exhaustion with politics and political history. You shared a little bit about this, but can you say more about what excites you about this moment, this 250th?
DD: I think that was another sort of impetus for that first projection. I had been thinking a lot about the 250th and how do we commemorate this moment when it feels like there’s more to sort of grapple with than to celebrate. And how many parallels there are between what people are facing in the 18th century and today.
KS: You were inspired by this moment, right? What’s exciting about grappling?
DD: Before this project, it I felt like, what do we do? So many things that felt like inherent values…good and bad seemed obvious and maybe generally agreed upon. And all of that was sort of thrown up in the air in the last decade, I guess. And, what do we do? And then digging more into the history of the American Revolution and seeing how all of these forces existed, we talk about oppression and tyranny from British rule and taxation, but the forces of, you know, there’s slavery and racism. Women had no legal standing. There was Indigenous removal. There are all of these things that continue today. And, you know, like with the SAVE Act, married women might not be able to vote. You can look back to history and you can see what people did.
You can see that in the 18th century, there were black Bostonians who were petitioning for freedom. And you can see that there were women advocating for themselves. And you can see the sacrifices that people were willing to make for themselves and their neighbors. And I think trying to bring that into the conversation around the 250th is inspiring.
I think it’s inspiring to complicate the stories of America’s founding, because when we get to these anniversaries, it feels like it’s often fife and drum music and, you know, a bust of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The project is called Precedented Times…there’s so much to be learned from and recreated and avoided from history.
KS: So this project, there’s the projection, there’s what people see on the building, but there’s also dialogue and discussion. As I understand it, some of that discussion then also shows up on the buildings. Can you say more about how people interact with the project?
DD: So I have been doing the guerrilla-style projections for a year, and I saw conversations and reactions to them online, which is primarily how they’ve been shared.
And I was thinking about how so much of the work in the 18th century was done by people coming together and talking about this. And inspired by town halls, which is what led to this next generation of the project, the Precedented Times Town Hall series. So, it is going to be a series of three events where, it’s going to be hosted in historic spaces across the city. It’ll be conversations that bring together historians and modern advocates and organizers to talk about specific moments in Boston’s history. And attendees will have opportunities to contribute to the conversation. Digitally, [they can] interact with some questions and contribute their thoughts. And, so it’ll be an interior speaker event with interactive moments and projection inside. And then, the main thoughts and themes that come out through the conversation will then be projected on the exterior following it.
KS: You’ve said that, some of the research you’ve been doing makes you think about how people were doing these things in the past. They were organizing, they were connecting. And sometimes they’re ordinary people.
In the projections, they’re kind of extraordinary, right? Their words are really big. What do you think this project says to people who think of themselves as ordinary people today?
DD: Well, folks have said that it makes them feel less alone. And, it gives them hope. I hope it inspires sort of action and engagement and people that collectively we can make serious change, just like they did in the 18th century. That it was ordinary people until we wrote history books about them.
KS: Is there any particular story that you’re planning on bringing into the projection that was really interesting to you, or surprised you when you started researching it?
DD: I don’t know how this is going to express itself through the projection, but learning more and more individual stories…I feel like when you are taught history, you get sort of “shapes.” You get “this is what women were doing” and “this is what Black people were doing.” And, you know, then you get Samuel Adams. But having an opportunity to, really dig in and learn about specific individuals, has been really surprising and shown how complicated history is. It’s not these easily digestible shapes. I read recently read Jill Lepore’s book about Benjamin Franklin’s sister, Jane Franklin, I think it’s called The Book of Ages.
Knowing that all of these characters that we have from history were real people who had a network of real people who were just as vibrant and active and alive, is interesting and something that I want to bring in to the project. I don’t know specifically how that’s going to express itself.
KS: Would you say in some ways, by bringing together historians, organizers and attendees that we’re sort of seeing ourselves as part of a network, not just a single individual in history?
DD: Absolutely. I think some of the strongest things that have worked as resistance movements have not been the actions of individuals, but it’s boycotts. Even like Paul Revere, the first event is going to be at Old North Church in a few days, within a few days of the anniversary of Paul Revere’s midnight ride.
You think about, Paul Revere’s a lone rider, but it was Joseph Warren telling Paul Revere the news. It was somebody going up into the tower to hang the lanterns. It was somebody rowing him across the river. It was somebody meeting him on the other side and giving him a horse. It was countless people. That’s why I’m excited for this to be not me and a projector on the street, but a room full of people, having these conversations and hopefully planning and taking action.
KS: How does a project start? How do you start a projection project?
DD: This project has started one of two ways. Either responding to a headline and thinking, you know, that reverberates with history, like there’s somebody in history who said something about this already. And they were in Boston.
And then the alternative is anticipating an anniversary. So, we not long ago, projected on the Dorchester Heights monument for the 250th of Evacuation Day and thinking about what did that day mean then? And, how can it inspire us today to take action?
KS: So you’re inspired by a moment or a headline and its connection to history and then you start thinking about what the visual is going to be?
KS: You’re in Boston, Massachusetts, a place where you’re kind of surrounded by history all the time. And yet we still need something beyond just, “hey, that’s a historic building,” to engage with it. What do you think is the potential in our state and in your city to engage with history in new ways?
DD: Yeah, I think these historic sites can be inspiring. I think they can also fade into the landscape and you can take them for granted. You can walk past them every day. But I think they can be inspiring as these tangible connections to history, and to people specifically, and the fact that these buildings have witnessed so many generations of Bostonians or Massachusetts residents.
You know, both encountering and resisting oppression. I think it’s a reminder that we walk in the footsteps of the people who came before us and it’s almost like a bridge to the past and a reminder that we have the same potential to enact change as the people who occupied these spaces before us.
KS: Well, thank you so much, Diane. It was really great talking with you. And I think that that take away that, there’s a lot to grapple with in history. And it’s also this sort of a reminder that people make history and that we have that opportunity here in Massachusetts all the time.
