The Sandwich Pasted Round the District
Is seeing really remembering?
Do you remember when U.S. Senator Alex Padilla was tackled, handcuffed, and removed from a press conference held by Kristi Noem? How about when Pete Hegseth accidentally added journalist Jeffery Goldberg to a Signal group chat and shared sensitive information including the U.S. plan to bomb Houthi targets across Yemen? If you couldn’t remember these events without prompting, you are not alone. During the second Trump administration, keeping up with the news has become overwhelming, to say the least. A 2025 study conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that while 80% of Americans feel it is important to be informed about the news when they vote, over half are worn out by the amount of news that is available to them. The result of this news is a fast-paced cycle that creates information overload, leaving people struggling to remember what happened, compounded by the stress of high stakes events.
In the 20th and 21st century, technology has been evolving rapidly. From the evolution of the digital era from standard webpages to Web 2.0 to curated ‘for you pages,’ the change happening in modern technologies has been staggering and contributes directly to this news information overload. The norms of protest and gathering practices has escalated quickly in kind with the news. What started as word of mouth and phone trees has since evolved to best practices on social media. However, with hyper-personalized algorithms becoming standard, and social media companies like X and Instagram being owned by billionaires who profit from Trump friendly policies, there has been a new resurgence of analog field work in Washington, D.C. activism. This is especially true in protest art. In Washington, D.C., it now feels almost impossible to walk a block without seeing a wheat paste poster on a construction site or lamppost. These posters range from advertising neighborhood town halls to broadly criticizing Elon Musk, and range in artistic efforts. They are a part of the protest culture that are helping Washington, D.C. remember the news.
In a nation of increasing political divisiveness and information overload, I became deeply interested in the return to this semipermanent, localized protest. From March 2025 to March 2026, I conducted a collection project of these posters in Washington, D.C. I have visited a variety of neighborhoods throughout Washington, D.C. to collect over 200 photos of political wheat paste posters. I’m confident that there are many more that I didn’t capture. While my photographs are not a comprehensive guide to Washington, D.C. wheat paste posters, they still provide a powerful argument to how wheat paste posters have exploded the activism scene of Washington, D.C., changing the way people have access to news, local rallies, and critiques of the current government.
These posters are pasted up on almost every block I walk down now. They used to be less common, but exploded during the second Trump administration. They are pasted by individuals and local organizations. They are placed on street lamps, construction sites, electrical boxes, and even on the sides of buildings. They force anyone who is walking past them to pay attention. The design of these posters is often flashy, and to a quick point. They provide a quick burst of information when the viewer might not be expecting it. An example of this is the poster pictured below from the Capitol Hill neighborhood. It asks the viewer to “defend the constitution from all enemies.” There are a variety of actions the viewer could be called to do, and the interpretation is more open. However, it does still include an invitation to the viewer to become potentially involved in this defense and forces the viewer on their street corner to think about how they might aid in this or at least question how the constitution is under attack from “foreign and domestic” enemies. To different viewers, these attacks could be radically different. But each viewer is brought into the conversation.
These ‘guerilla’ tactics of wheat paste posters can be explained by Umberto Eco, a media and communication scholar who was concerned by the “gradual, uniform bombardment of information, where different contents are leveled and lose their differences.". This “bombardment” is shockingly familiar, as Eco published this essay in 1986, before the rise of social media. He proposes that his bombardment is something to be fought against so that society can continue to interpret their own media. Eco argues that ambiguous messages can become clear once considering their context, or a shared code by the message sender and the message receiver. Eco then continues his message, relating it to the current political sphere. Eco argues that “the idea that we must ask the scholars and educators of tomorrow to abandon the TV studios or the offices of the newspapers, to fight a door-to-door guerrilla battle like provos of Critical Reception can be frightening and can also seem utopian." Sound familiar? It should. These posters serve as the 'door-to-door' method that Eco is proposing. Eco proposes that a radical shift to “nonindustrial forms of communication” can be the basis of the future subversive communication because the clarity of those narrowcast media limit the rate of renewed reinterpretations and instead leave the message free for the receiver to decode at will. As Gary Genosko explains, Eco puts the power of influence in the hands of the receiver.
In the case of the wheat paste poster, the long-standing message makes this reinterpretation on reengagement possible. There is an unexpectedness to seeing a political call to action on a street corner, or the side of a bar. This play into the “cultural guerrilla” that Eco calls for continues to explain a new idea behind the logic of the wheat paste posters. The surprise of this unexpected medium of communication in the technological age provides a new way for viewers to engage with the act of protest. This door-to-door battle opens specific methods of engagement, but it does not dictate the reaction or interpretation of any passerby that might view the wheat paste posters. This, according to Eco, allows the viewer to do the interpretive work of decoding, the power of which is more powerful in a set, unexpected “guerrilla” medium.
An example of this is a local news story went viral that you might have forgotten. Do you remember Sean Dunn? What about if I called him sandwich man? On August 11, Dunn threw a sandwich as a Customs and Border Patrol officer in Washington, D.C. and was subsequently arrested. Following his arrest, a swath of posters went up around the city memorializing his actions. They sprung up in neighborhoods across the city. This caused a forced confrontation of those who might be visiting, or just walking by, with the actions of Dunn and the subsequent actions of the U.S. government.
If this is your reminder of the cultural moment that Dunn occupied, you are probably not alone. In this news cycle, on television, social media, and the internet at large, it is easy to forget Dunn. However, if you are one of the people who walk past the posters that remain up pictured outside of As You Are in Eastern Market, or by the Petworth Metro stop, or in a variety of other neighborhoods throughout Washington, D.C., Dunn becomes easier to remember. These ‘guerilla’ posters interrupt the rapid and overwhelming news cycle, and provide reminders to what has happened, even only nine months ago. This remembrance and ubiquity are what make wheat paste posters so appealing. They last beyond what algorithms encourage us to forget and remind us to act. Whatever that might look like.