By Brilee Weaver

As he makes his way down Columbus Avenue, Terry Marshall looks like a human coat rack. A backpack is slung over his shoulder, a stack of books is perched on one arm, a paper bag from the cafe down the street balances on the other, and his puffy, rust colored jacket and maroon knit hat top him off.

Marshall stops and fumbles with his keys, then opens the front door to Make Shift Boston.

It's easy to overlook the cooperative workspace, just around the corner from the Mass Ave. Orange Line stop. Paint peels from the red brick that borders its windows. A pair of faded, painted palm trees accompany the notices scattered across the glass beside the front door.

Potted plants that peek up from the windowsill hint at Marshall's grassroots organizing efforts as the founder of Intelligent Mischief (IM), a "creative action design lab" that consults with community organizations to help them develop effective cultural narratives. These narratives, Marshall says, better inform group organizing. In the past, IM has worked with City Life Vida Urbana, an organizing effort for racial, social, and economic justice, and the Boston Ujima Project, which seeks to strengthen local economic control in low income communities and communities of color in Boston.

Members of the IM team are also working to document black lives and the cultures that shape them; they call this moment for documentation the "Black Cultural Renaissance." The movement also includes work by YouTube personalities, Afro-punk artists, and other media makers, and has taken place alongside the Black Lives Matter movement that sprang out of the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin.

"[IM is] an organization that's a culmination of all of the years I've been organizing," Marshall says of his work, after walking up the wooden staircase to the Make Shift loft, where he settles into his narrow desk. Books titled Massive Change, Uprising, and Beautiful Trouble line the desk's top shelf and rolled poster papers fill a five-gallon True Value bucket beside it.

Like the desk that serves as the organization's home base, with a large filing cabinet to one side and an unplugged keyboard to the other, the IM team is compact and united around a common theme: the intersection between art and culture that, Marshall says, leads to change.

"Culture [is] the glue of society. It's what informs, what tells us how to behave and function — how to operate in society. If you can shift culture, then you're making social change."

Marshall says that collecting and naming this cultural movement connected to Black Lives Matter is an important way to bring creative thinkers together and, eventually, expand the very meaning of what it means to be black today.

"[We] want to document [this culture] and put it out there; to have folks who are involved in it recognize each other and let it go forward and grow; to liberate black life," he says. "Blackness is very narrowly defined. And that narrowness has life and death consequences. If black men are only allowed to be seen as dangerous, then you have deadly encounters with law enforcement."

The organization confronts such prescribed black identities in its working project, titled The Black Body Survival Guide. The project grew out of one of IM's creative hacks, where community organizations work together to prototype a solution for a social issue. It uses original illustrations to create a satirical narrative about the experience of "black and brown folks," Marshall's fond and frequently-used words for the artists, thinkers and Boston residents that contribute to and inspire his work. The guide provides tips and tricks for surviving in a "post-racial" America where, Marshall says, violence and police killings — and the reasons for them — are, often, "absurd."

The hands of those featured in the guide's illustrations are always up, even while using the bathroom or working out on the treadmill. Some illustrations even call on readers to remember to "only wear a hoodie at home," to "carry at least two forms of ID [at all times]," and to "keep [their] hands out of [their] pockets when walking down the street, into a store, [or] around other people."

"We thought, you can't combat [this violence] with logic; you have to use surrealism in order to expose the absurdity of it," Marshall says.

"Black Body Survival Cards" are an offshoot of the project, which require the "card owner" to have a white person as a "cosigner." The card is, within the same satirical framework as the guide, intended for anyone who may come into contact with and feel threatened by its black or brown card owner. It asks that the cosigner be contacted "immediately before deciding to interact negatively in anyway with the owner/carrier of [the] card."

The guide, Marshall hopes, will soon be available in a physical, print version. Original artifacts associated with the guide, including the Black Girl Magic Eraser (meant to erase harmful narratives so they can be rewritten), Black Essence (which, according to the IM Instagram account, is often "stolen and abused" but is "priceless"), and an Invisibility Cloak (for emergency survival attempts) have recently been featured at Boston University as an art installation titled "Black Body Survival Store."

Marshall says that the 2016 presidential election, and the political upheaval and social turmoil that resulted from it, is proof that meaningful narratives can have a lasting impact. He credits President Donald Trump's use of a distinctive, unwavering narrative, with a clear hero-enemy dynamic, for his triumph on social media and, eventually, with the Electoral College.

"[Trump] said, 'I know who your problem is. Your problem is immigrants, these other lazy people, these Mexicans,'" says Marshall. "And he said, 'I'm the only one that can save you.' He gave them a story to latch onto that was powerful enough."

In addition to making a narrative, Trump shifted an existing one, Marshall says. Candidates that preceded him boasted a portfolio of work in the political sphere, spoke with a certain vernacular, and presented themselves in a certain way.

Marshall cites some elements of the Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders campaigns, as well as the Trump campaign, and emphasizes the importance of feelings of unity when in times of devisiveness.

For Obama, it was his vision of an undivided America.

For Sanders, it was his mission against Wall Street.

For Trump, Marshall says, it was inciting fear.

But for the team at IM, it's the symbiotic relationship between art and culture that leads to a unified vision and change.

In the coming months, the IM team hopes to collaborate with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and will engage in a project titled "Creatives of Dudley," which highlights artists in the historically black neighborhood. A project that explores the politics of Trinidadian Carnival, inspired by Marshall’s recent trip to Trinidad, is also in the works.