Klirs’ Fugazi obsession took hold nearly 17 years ago while he was in high school. At Fort Reno’s Summer Concert Series in 2002, he witnessed the band’s final show in the U.S.

“To see literally thousands of people from the city that I live in come see this one band, and know every word to their songs — it felt like a big, vibrant community,” Klirs says. “It showed me that punk can be its own world that doesn’t have to be this outlier thing.”

“Visualizing Fugazi” came into fruition last fall as Klirs’ graduate thesis project for Maryland Institute College of Art, where he was studying information visualization. With frontman Ian MacKaye’s blessing, Klirs was able to mine data from the band’s Fugazi Live Series website, which lists every show the quartet played from 1987 through its last gig in 2002. (In total, Fugazi played over 1,000 concerts across five continents and in all 50 U.S. states.) Klirs used software tools such as Tableau and Photoshop to bring the data to life.

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“All together, it was probably around 200 hours of work,” Klirs says.

For his thesis, Klirs had the graphics printed into a fanzine, which he also began selling on his personal website. Soon enough, people from all over the world started inquiring about the project, including Jason Hamacher, founder and director of Lost Origins Gallery, who offered Klirs a chance to exhibit his work.

Aside from his graphics — which were reprinted in a larger format for viewing — the gallery is displaying never-before-seen Fugazi memorabilia such as flyers, photographs and more from archivist and musician John Davis, whose extensive D.C. punk collection is housed at the University of Maryland. An audio collage of recordings from Fugazi shows plays over the gallery’s sound system to enhance the experience.

At the vanguard of D.C.’s do-it-yourself movement, Fugazi often played benefit gigs for local charities, raising around $250,000 over the band’s life span, according to Klirs. To create a graphic that illustrates this aspect of the band, he crunched attendance figures and door pricing from the Live Series archive (factoring in incidental and production costs), and also referred to records that MacKaye had kept on the band’s shows.

“They picked organizations where a donation of a few thousand dollars would have a significant impact,” Klirs says. “They ended up doing more benefit shows for Washington Free Clinic — who would provide free health care for AIDS patients — than any other group.”

Also impressive, according to Klirs, is the sprawling nature of the band’s influence and connections. To put it into perspective, he designed a family tree — using data from bandtoband.com — showing musical acts that are connected to the quartet via shared members. Fugazi’s members — MacKaye, Joe Lally, Brendan Canty and Guy Picciotto — have played in a slew of other bands, such as Minor Threat, Rites of Spring and Deathfix. Klirs’ tree traces their connections from there to a multitude of other notable acts. For example, Metallica’s connection to Fugazi can be traced in just four steps: MacKaye’s Minor Threat is tied to Bad Religion (via guitarist Brian Baker); former Bad Religion drummer Brooks Wackerman played in Suicidal Tendencies; and that band is connected to Metallica via bassist Robert Trujillo.

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“The really cool thing about [the family tree] visualization is that there are also current active punk bands from the D.C. area on the list, like Priests and Flasher,” Klirs says. “It’s not just an exploration of a dead history — it’s a way to connect the band’s impact and influence on the punk scene today.”

The project began as a tribute to his favorite band, but Klirs says “Visualizing Fugazi” morphed into something much deeper.

“When I was at the gallery, people were looking at the band’s family tree and saying, ‘Oh, my friend plays in that band’ or ‘I’m just a few degrees off because I played with this guy who’s in this band that’s on the chart,’ ” Klirs says. “The visuals make the history seem more relevant and vibrant.”