“I was making work to be able to deal with my grief.” Following the death of his brother on September 19th, 2014 to a heroin overdose, Adam Delmarcelle began creating poster after poster expounding upon his emotions surrounding his loss. Initially the posters had no explicit purpose, other than a way for Delmarcelle to vent his frustrations; however, most of the work was politically fueled. While they obviously displayed messages his grief and sadness, they were also of how the system failed Delmarcelle’s brother and his family, how poorly the local police handled the case, and how hypercritical he was being about the local government.

Around the two-year anniversary of his brother’s passing, Delmarcelle decided to take his work to the streets. He, accompanied by a handful of friends, took 1,000 of his posters and covered every telephone and light stand in Lebanon County. He fully expected that the posters would simply hang there, ignored, until they simply rotted away. Unexpectedly, within a few days, the posters developed a sizeable social media presence; people wanted to know more about where the posters came from, and what exactly they were about. On the third day of the posters being up, the mayor of Lebanon ordered the police chief to have all the posters removed and destroyed. Fortunately for Delmarcelle and the project, this was the best possible outcome.

Since the removal of the initial posters, the What Heroin Sounds Like project has been taken to a national stage after the Huffington Post published an article discussing the guerilla posters as well as the overall heroin and opioid epidemic throughout the United States. Soon after, Delmarcelle’s posters were added to the Fine Art Holding’s permanent collection at the Library of Congress. Overall, it is from these posters that the rest of the What Heroin Sounds Like project was born.