TOMORROW’S ANCESTORS
Tomorrow’s Ancestors : The Wall is a community public art project that holds the memory of a neighborhood in monumental form.
Devin Osorio and Emma Nuzzo are inviting community into the creation of a mural that chronicles the Dominican diaspora to uptown NYC through vernacular histories and embodied communal archive. Central to our inquiry is spiritual practice - not as a cultural supplement to demographic or economic history, but taken seriously as a living archive – a way Dominicans in diaspora have produced knowledge about continuity and belonging, maintained connection to land and ancestry, and created worlds of meaning that grow in displacement and migration.
We extend the mural-making process far beyond mere painting. Through a series of workshops, and grounded in the ethic of collaboration, the cohort will work together from inception to execution: collective ideation, gathering research and procuring oral histories, designing the collaborative composition and realizing it in paint, to be rendered in Devin’s iconographic visual language.
Want to participate? We’re looking to create a cohort of 8 early-career creatives. The workshops are designed at the advanced undergraduate level, though enrollment in a degree program is not required. Participants do not need to identify as a visual artist. We understand creative practice expansively– as the capacity to think and make creatively in whatever medium that takes. We look forward to constructing a cohort whose skills, perspectives and interests compliment one another– artists, writers, designers, historians, organizers, storytellers, scrapbookers, wonderers, listeners. Apply to join us!
Our Mission:
We want to model a way of making murals that generates new forms of dialogue in our city, that roots the stories of a community in the walls of its own neighborhood. The images that make up our space inadvertently tell us who has power, whose voices are important to share. Our work seeks to preserve spiritual histories, support them as knowledge, and create a public work that reflects the cosmologies of the neighborhood it lives in — understanding one mural could never hold all its textures.
The cohort centers Dominican voices and testimony, polyvocal and lived, while remaining open to who can participate in the act of listening, learning, and collective creation. We believe this moment demands that we learn to build coalition both within and across lines of identity, and to understand listening as an active form of participation. In this process, students build concrete research and oral history skills while coming to understand their creative labor as a real force for shaping community, whether they are authoring their own story or empowering someone else's.
Workshop Overview:
This 10-part interdisciplinary workshop series guides a cohort of young creatives through the creation of a mural that holds the memory of a neighborhood in monumental form. Approaching public art not simply as visual production but as a process of listening, remembering, gathering, and building community through shared creative practice, we treat the image as a site to think with and through, moving across three phases:
Grounding + Collective Inquiry
The cohort interrogates the inherited frameworks that shape how we see: the colonial history of image ontology, how archives construct and exclude what is considered ‘knowledge,’ Dominican diasporic spirituality as an epistemological foundation, and how public muralism can be wielded toward community formation and belonging.
Oral Histories + Community Engagement
The cohort carries these questions into the field. Learning the methodology of oral history, each students conducts conversations with two community members. Recordings are shared across the full cohort, who listen to every interview before the final session. Conversations gathered throughout the process become the foundation for the mural’s visual language and conceptual direction, allowing lived experience and personal testimony to shape the work itself. Participants begin to understand public art not as individual authorship, but as collective authorship rooted in community dialogue and shared memory.
Collaborative Composition + Mural Creation
Returning to the studio, the cohort thinks with what images can do and how public archives can be expanded, to synthesize a composition that tends to the testimonies gathered. In Spring 2027, the final phase culminates in the painting of the mural in Washington Heights. The mural becomes both artwork and archive — a public space carrying memory, testimony, and intergenerational connection into the landscape.
Throughout the workshop series, participants gain practical experience in research, oral history methodologies, collaborative artistic production, and public engagement while becoming part of a growing network of creatives and cultural workers invested in collective creative practice. The program values experimentation, curiosity, care, and interdisciplinary thinking, welcoming participants from diverse creative and academic backgrounds.
Ready to Participate?
Featured In
1202 Magazine — “Tomorrow’s Ancestors”
Tomorrow’s Ancestors was featured in 1202 Magazine, which described the project as a “creative community lab” transforming a Harlem apartment into a space for collective reflection, artistic experimentation, and community care.
The article highlights the collaborative vision of artist Devin Osorio and curator Emma Nuzzo, emphasizing how the project blurred the boundaries between exhibition, workshop, ritual, and public gathering. Through free community programming—including spoken word events, workshops, conversations, and healing-centered practices—the initiative explored Dominican diasporic memory, queer futurism, spirituality, and collective storytelling.
The publication framed Tomorrow’s Ancestors as an alternative model for contemporary art practice: one rooted not in institutional distance, but in participation, interdependence, accessibility, and community connection.
