The Stories of Us
As the first grantee under the Foundation’s racial healing pillar, The Stories of Us (TSOU) is a national civic imagination nonprofit that exists to inspire a culture of storytelling, exploring the two ideals at the core of the Declaration of Independence: equality and solidarity. The organization exemplifies how truth-telling and artistic expression can converge to create powerful, public moments of reckoning and reconnection.
TSOU has created an art exhibition that travels from city to city, growing in scale with each stop. It features large-scale drum sculptures — called "talking drums" — on which artist paintings explore the tension between America’s founding ideals and its origins in slavery. As part of DTRF's sponsorship, TSOU engaged a New Orleans-based artist, Ashley Teamer, to speak with Descendants and tell their story in a new medium. As the sculptures travel from city to city, the project invites audiences to confront the lived legacies of enslavement in a deeply human, visual form.
The Descendant-inspired drum, designed by acclaimed visual artist Ashley Teamer, features powerful images evocative of ancestors' experiences. Overlapping profiles of Descendants evoke generational memory, while the tender image of a baby in utero represents the vulnerability of enslaved children and the commodification of motherhood. One image juxtaposes a cross with a farming hoe, challenging viewers to reckon with the Catholic Church’s dual legacy of spiritual authority and slaveholding.
“Just as we all look back, we will all be looked back on — and people will look back on what we do by our art,” said Melisande Short-Colomb, a Descendant interviewed for The Stories of Us project. "I’m grateful to the artist for listening to Descendant experiences and capturing the complications and contradictions of our country’s history in a way that will stand the test of time.”
The exhibition debuted in Armstrong Park in New Orleans on Juneteenth with a press conference and ribbon cutting ceremony featuring artists and Frederick Delahoussaye, Director of the New Orleans Mayor’s Office of Cultural Economy. The Foundation was represented by the powerful words of Descendant and DTRF board member Cheryllyn Branche.
The Juneteenth event invited the public into a dialogue not just with history, but with themselves. Individuals stopped, read the descriptions, took photos, and spoke to us about the feelings it stirred in them.
The TSOU exhibition started its tour in Detroit before appearing at the United Nations in New York, then traveled to Cleveland and New Orleans. A few weeks later, the drums were featured at the ESSENCE Festival of Culture, where DTRF President & CEO Monique Trusclair Maddox appeared on a panel with TSOU Founder Ashley Shaw Scott Adjaye and artist Monique Lorden. The exhibition will arrive in more cities including Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., in the coming year, each time offering a public invitation to engage with truth, history, and healing.
Collaborations like these affirm that racial healing requires more than policy. It requires proximity, imagination, and collective reflection. Art — especially art rooted in lived experience — can open hearts and move people in profound ways. In lifting the voices of Descendants through this work, we create space for these stories to be not just known but felt — and in doing so, make them harder to look away from.