Program Overview

Tomorrow’s Ancestors : The Wall is designed as a collaborative learning environment bringing together emerging creatives, organizers, researchers, writers, and artists through a series of workshops centered on community knowledge and public art practice. Together, we move through a 10-part interdisciplinary workshop series to create a mural that holds the memory of a neighborhood in monumental form — chronicling the Dominican diaspora to uptown NYC through vernacular histories and embodied communal archive.

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. In the 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. 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 want to model a way of making murals in New York that demonstrates the value of creative labor and generates new forms of dialogue — and to build a cohort of young creatives who will carry this practice into their own communities, continuing to produce public, researched, community-based works long after this wall is finished.