Project OverviewTomorrow’s Ancestors: The Wall is a community mural project that holds the memory of a neighborhood in monumental form.
Devin Osorio and Emma Nuzzo are inviting the 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 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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Tomorrow’s Ancestors: The Wall is a community-authored mural project celebrating Dominican diasporic history, culture, spirituality, and collective memory in Washington Heights.
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Washington Heights is home to one of the largest Dominican communities outside the Dominican Republic. The neighborhood provides a meaningful setting to explore the histories, stories, and cultural traditions that shape the community.
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The project centers Dominican diasporic experiences to honor the people, traditions, and stories that have shaped generations while creating space for those histories to continue evolving.
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The title reflects the idea that we are both inheritors of ancestral knowledge and creators of what future generations will inherit.
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The mural will be developed through collaborative workshops, conversations, oral histories, and creative exercises that allow community members to influence the stories and imagery represented in the final work.
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The project brings together community members and early-career creatives from a range of disciplines and backgrounds. Participants do not need to identify as visual artists to contribute.