Who We Are
Tomorrow’s Ancestors is our ongoing collaborative composition: a platform using Devin Osorio's artistic practice as an engine for building participatory creative projects centering the Dominican community in Washington Heights, dissolving the line between fine art and community practice.
Our programming started last summer, when we elevated a solo presentation of Devin’s latest body of work into a creative community lab, activating a constellation of participatory artistic programming. Nestled inside an apartment in Harlem, our exhibition hosted 18 events in collaboration with Uptown creatives over the month of June – including cooking workshops, drag shows, Spanish spoken word, writing workshops, healing spaces, interactive lectures, figure drawing and more– celebrating all creative agencies as shades of the same expression. We now seek to continue this work in The Wall, an experiment in collective creativity.
Ready to Participate?
DEVIN OSORIO
Artist • Educator • Visual Storyteller
Devin Osorio (b.1993, New York) is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Their work honors Dominican culture through shrine-like paintings incorporating plants, animals, and glyphs, blending shared and self-reflective symbolism to create a visual vernacular for the Dominican American community. With a focus on cultural memory and identity, Osorio’s paintings serve as a bridge between personal experience and collective heritage. Osorio’s work has been exhibited internationally, with shows in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, Dominican Republic and Madrid. Notable exhibitions include galleries such as the Crocker Art Museum, The AHL Foundation, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Wave Hill, and Charlie James Gallery. Their work has been featured at major art fairs, including NADA Miami, Untitled Miami, and URVNT Art Fair, and was showcased in a solo presentation at NADA Miami in 2022. Osorio has also participated in auctions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and El Museo del Barrio, with their work held in permanent collections at the Crocker Museum and the Xing Museum of Contemporary Art.
A past artist-in-residence at New Wave in West Palm Beach, Osorio recently spoke on the Page to Practice: Artists in Conversation panel at MoMA’s Creativity Lab. In addition to their artistic practice, Osorio works as a Contract Educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as the Director of the Design Collective and The Shop at New Design High School in the Lower East Side. They focus their efforts on career readiness programs that promote financial empowerment through social-emotional learning and the development of freelance skills. Osorio holds a BFA in Fibers from the Savannah College of Art and Design.
EMMA NUZZO
Curator • Community Organizer • Educator
Emma Nuzzo is a curator, community organizer, and Solomon B. Hayden Fellow at Columbia University in the Art History and Archaeology department. Her current work weaves theory and praxis, bringing critical insight from her academic research into contemporary social practice projects while actively challenging established epistemologies in art historical discourse — how we read, display, write about, interact with and value art. Drawing from her experience in education and community organizing, including her role as Programs and Partnerships Manager for For Freedoms during the first Trump administration, her academic research investigates the mechanics of visual activism, leveraging wisdom from ancestors and contemporary practitioners to better understand how communities can be built through creative action. Nuzzo advocates for art as a human right, seeing creativity as an inherent human capacity and technology of connection in a society that encourages our atomization. She is the Founder of Cereus Art, formerly a nomadic gallery supporting emerging artists, now dedicated to building infrastructure for collective creative expression. Nuzzo graduated from Williams College in 2016 with a degree in Art History and Africana Studies and participated in the Studio Museum in Harlem's 2019 Educational Practicum.
