“Walls are the mirrors of society.”
Standing before “Post No Bills,” it’s easy to see what Turkish-American artist Burhan Doğançay meant. The textures of layered paper, torn edges and half-faded messages seem to hum with the energy of a city — its voices, protests and forgotten announcements stacked on top of each other like sediment. The surface feels alive, even in stillness, as though the wall itself has stories it’s waiting to tell.
The irony of silence
But there’s irony in its name. The phrase “Post No Bills” is a demand meant to keep walls blank, to enforce order. Yet, in city after city, those same walls inevitably become public canvases. Flyers appear overnight, pasted in defiance. Collaged layers of torn posters and weathered advertisements claim their space. As layers peel and crumble, they leave behind remnants of long-gone events, unsanctioned speech, and glimpses of a city’s past. In capturing these surfaces, Doğançay immortalized what was always meant to be temporary.
A collage of urban narratives
The “Post No Bills” exhibit at the University of Michigan Museum of Art brings this contradiction into focus. His work isn’t photographs, though the pieces look like it. Instead, meticulous mixed-media collages mimic the raw, accidental beauty of real-life urban walls.
Doğançay, a former diplomat turned artist, spent decades traveling through more than 100 cities, collecting images of walls plastered with posters and graffiti. The walls that many saw as vandalized surfaces he interpreted as evolving narratives reflecting the people who passed by, the movements that took shape and the resistance that refused to be erased.
The digital shift
Today, however, many of those walls have gone silent. The bold messages once scrawled across public spaces are now more likely to appear in TikTok videos or viral tweets. Hash tags widely replace protest posters that once layered over city walls. Public spaces are no longer just physical but also digital.
What would Doğançay have made of this shift? Would he have documented the feeds of digital spaces the way he once did city streets?
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The University as a living archive
Perhaps that’s why “Post No Bills” still resonates. People are still trying to make their voices heard, whether in digital spaces or through physical postings. UM has long been a vocal community. From walls and bulletin boards covered in posters to telephone and light poles wrapped in flyers and stickers, these spaces provide a tangible way for individuals to share messages with the rest of the student body, Ann Arbor residents and visitors.
These layers of communication, much like those Doğançay captured, reflect the ever-evolving ways people connect, advocate and share information in public spaces. UM’s campus serves as a living archive of voices and movements. Perhaps we can take a moment to see these layers not as clutter but as a collection of voices, movements and moments in time.
Leaving a mark
Doğançay’s work reminds us that people will always find ways to leave their mark. And in doing so, they leave behind an archive — whether on paper, pixels or peeling paint—of who they were and what they had to say.
The Post No Bills exhibition at UMMA runs until July 13, 2025. Visitors can experience firsthand how Doğançay captured the ephemeral language of urban walls and transformed them into lasting artistic statements.
