Since 1995, go-go music has emanated from the speakers outside a tele-communications store in DC’s Shaw neighborhood. Though in compliance with city ordinances, the owner was forced to turn his music down after a neighbor from a new luxury condo complained to T-Mobile national headquarters. This precipitated the #DontMuteDC uprising which morphed into an urgent public conversation about gentrification, culture, and racial inequality.
This graphic novel project I designed for #Dontmutedc which firstly released at Smithsonian Folklife Festival Blog and then showed up in the 2019 Fourth of July Parade and many subsequent #dontmutedc protest activities and meetings.