THE MAKING OF
DIALOGUE? PROJECTS
THE STORY
Dialogue? started in New York City in 2003.
Ely was in high school when his older sister, Mckendree, asked him to help with an art project. She was writing messages in the windows of her apartment, visible from across the street, neighboring buildings, rooftops and passing double-decker buses.
The idea led to long conversations between them.
In New York, you can live ten feet from another person for years and never speak to them. That anonymity can be wonderful. It can also create boundaries, miscommunication and loneliness.
The question was what might happen if you interrupted it.
They called the project Dialogue?
Read full Dialogue? Projects story on my Substack Publication
THE PROJECT
The windows eventually came down to street level.
Mckendree and Ely put Dialogue?, with the question mark, on T-shirts.
When Mckendree moved to Spain, Ely kept working on the idea. He made and sold shirts to friends and classmates and eventually teamed up with his friend Patrick. They built a website and found a friend's father who could screen-print small runs.
The project became Dialogue? Projects.
People wore the shirts. Other people recognized them on the train or at the deli. Something that started as messages between windows became a way of carrying the question into other places and conversations.
This was before Facebook and Twitter. Before the iPhone. At almost exactly the moment that “messaging” as we know it today was beginning to take shape.
THE CULTURE
Dialogue? Projects grew beyond the original shirts.
New York City, Vermont, basketball, art, photography, film, theater, writing and business all became part of it. So did the people and places around those things.
HORATIO grew from years spent at a neighborhood basketball court and became a story about the people, culture and city around it. The Dialogue? Dunk Tee took an iconic New York underdog moment and turned it into something you could wear. Interviews became films, characters became writing, and projects created other projects.
The mediums changed, but the practice of being curious, making things and bringing different people and ideas into conversation remained.
More than twenty years after those first messages appeared in a New York window, Dialogue? Projects is still active, still evolving and still making room for what comes next.
The question mark stayed.
