It may be a silent protest, but the message is loud and clear. And ‘temporary graffiti’ is building a following. – The Boston Globe

“I’m coming to Boston, I’m bringing hell with me,” Homan said at a political conference in February.

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.

“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.

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 Silence Dogood, the small collective that has staged about a dozen acts of protest with stealthy nighttime projections in and around Boston in recent weeks.

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.

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.

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 Un-monument | Re-monument | De-monument: Transforming Boston initiative, a public art program that solicits ideas designed to “spark conversations about public memory, monuments, and collective history.” Dwyer’s proposal, called On This Site…, will reimagine Boston’s 400 or so historic markers to be more inclusive.

“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.

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).

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 Longfellow’s mythmaking poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride”: “In the hour of darkness and peril and need…” The message implicating “D.C.” was “a little edgier,” the vicar acknowledged.

“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.

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, multimedia artist Robin Bell made world headlines for projecting “PAY TRUMP BRIBES HERE” over the entrance to Trump International Hotel.

Another group, the Illuminator, has projected hundreds of simple messages around New York City: “Protest Trans Youth,” “Bans Off Our Bodies,” “Ceasefire Now.” In San Francisco, an activist trolled Elon Musk on the Twitter building after the billionaire acquired the social media company (now X).

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 created a temporary memorial to notable Bostonians of color — Mel King, Elma Lewis, the late rapper Keith “Guru” Elam — on the vacated plinth.

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.

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 her own venture, Stories & Spaces, has worked with clients from the Smithsonian Institute and the NFL to Universal Orlando’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

For her, the commitment to activist work came into sharp focus on a Friday in May, when she watched the live feed of a joint Town Hall meeting hosted by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell. The event featured four other state attorneys general from across New England.

“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 jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.