Elephants on the Avenue was a two-year community engagement project pairing artists with historians who lived or had close ties to the Germantown neighborhood. Drawing on deep archival research, I used art as a vehicle for collective memory - holding community meetings, breakfasts, and art-making workshops that brought forgotten histories into conversation with present-day concerns.

The work surfaces what erasure had long concealed: the stories of servants and enslaved Africans who cooked, cleaned, and labored in Germantown's households - lives deliberately omitted from the dominant historical record. These fragments of buried history reveal that struggles for racial equality, tension, and conflicting interest are not new. Germantown's past holds lessons and inspiration for the present.