Tomorrow’s Ancestors: The Wall is a community mural project that holds the memory of the Heights in monumental form.
We’re looking for a cohort of 8 early-career creatives to collaborate on a mural that chronicles the Dominican diaspora to Washington Heights. 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 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 enrolment 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 complement one another — artists, writers, designers, historians, organizers, storytellers, scrapbookers, wonderers, listeners.
Thinking Out Loud Together
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.
Our Process
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Right Now
applications open
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November 2026
interviews conducted with applicants
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December 2026
final team chosen
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March 2027
weekly workshops commence with the cohort
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Summer 2027
we paint collaborative composition alongside community partners
FAQs
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We have not yet secured the site for the mural. We are working with our mentors and community collaborators in Washington Heights to identify a site by the end of our workshop series (Spring 2027).
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Our lead artist Devin Osorio is a first-generation Dominican American from Washington Heights. Their creative practice centers in on the Heights, observing the history, habits of space and the kaleidoscopic community movements that have built the Heights into what we see today.
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Our cohort will embark on archival research and conduct oral histories with community members and elders in Washington Heights, using what we find to inform the composition of the mural.
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We are inviting early-career creatives to apply to our cohort. The project brings together creatives from a range of disciplines and backgrounds. Participants do not need to identify as visual artists to contribute.
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Murals imposed on a neighborhood can accelerate community displacement. We are working alongside a local historian and community stakeholders to think through partnerships, siting, and programming that ground the mural in service of the community whose stories it holds.
We are interested in placing the mural with a Dominican owned business in Washington Heights. Please reach out to tomorrowsancestors2026@gmail.com if you own or know a business that might be a good fit for our work!
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Some details of spiritual life are meant to stay within the community, and we are not here to publicize them on a wall. We are treating spirituality as a form of knowledge, and we are taking guidance from community members about what belongs in public and what does not.