Earth Day Celebration & Growing Abolition Opening at MoMA PS1

Join us for a celebration of Earth Day, featuring music, art-making workshops, and opportunities to seed a new green space at MoMA PS1. The day marks both the closing of Slow Factory’s The Revolution is a School in Homeroom, and the unveiling of jackie sumell & The Lower Eastside Girls Club: Growing Abolition, a new project unfolding around a greenhouse in the side courtyard of PS1 offering points of connection between environmental justice and prison abolition. To celebrate the dialogue forged between these projects, Slow Factory will host a series of musical performances and hands-on workshops on themes of sustainability and climate justice. Bring your used clothing for opportunities to repair, print on, or recycle the textiles. Visitors of all ages will also be invited to participate in the seeding of planters for the greenhouse, a project which continues PS1’s commitment to exploring urban green spaces as places of creativity, community building, and solidarity. Please note that workshop capacity is limited.

Workshops:
Repair Stations with Multitudes Studio and Makayla Wray
Terrarium Making Workshop with Olivia Rose
Planting with Alive Structures and jackie sumell
Screen Printing Station with Mae Lim Stark
Herb Bundling with One Love Community Fridge

Live Music:
Sam “Magic Man” Waymon
Felukah
Collis Browne

DJ Performances:
Jasmine Solano
DJ Eli

Textile Recycling:
North Brooklyn Neighbors

The second year of a collaboration between jackie sumell, the Lower Eastside Girls Club, and MoMA PS1, Growing Abolition is a multipart project investigating connections between ecology and prison abolition. Developing gradually from spring to winter, Growing Abolition unfolds around a greenhouse designed by sumell and installed in the side Courtyard of PS1. An offshoot of sumell’s celebrated Solitary Gardens project, the greenhouse is scaled to the footprint of a solitary confinement cell from a maximum security prison. Transforming a space of confinement into one of possibility, the greenhouse offers occasion for both growing and learning: through plantings, conversations, and workshops, sumell and a group of interns from the Lower Eastside Girls Club (LESGC) explore questions such as: What can plants teach us about abolition, healing, and expanding our horizons of possibility? What does abolition have to do with natural building? Reflecting on a history of community gardens in New York City (a history connected to that of the LESGC), the project also considers how urban gardens can exist as expressions of love, as much as resistance. Each plant grown by sumell and the girls carries with it history and politics—symbolisms, medicinal uses, and cultural legacies—that teach us about the persistence of radical ecology.

Growing Abolition will expand organically over the spring and summer, both within the museum’s courtyard walls and beyond. Plants will grow and be added; vines will creep up the courtyard’s concrete walls; and seedlings will find new homes in community gardens throughout the city. Through a series of workshops in the spring and summer, sumell and the LESGC interns will create seed packets and seedlings, some of which will be transferred and donated to neighboring gardens in Queensbridge Houses and other local sites. Seed packets will also be available for visitors to the museum to take away. The project culminates in an installation designed by the LESGC girls in PS1’s Homeroom in September 2022.

Growing Abolition is presented as part of Life Between Buildings a group exhibition running from June 2, 2022 – January 16, 2023. Inspired by the history of community gardening, Life Between Buildings reflects on how artists have engaged interstitial spaces of New York City through an ecological lens, from the 1970s through present day.

jackie sumell’s work, anchored at the intersection of abolition, art, social practice, permaculture, and contemplative studies, has been exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe. She has spent the last two decades working directly with incarcerated folx, most notably, her elders Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King—collectively known as the Angola 3. sumell has been the recipient of multiple residencies and fellowships including: Art Matters Fellowship & Joan Mitchell Studio Fellowship, Art for Justice Fellowship, S.O.U.R.C.E. Fellowship, Creative Capital Grant, A Blade of Grass Fellowship, MSU’s Critical Race Studies Fellowship, Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship, Soros Justice Fellowship, Eyebeam Project Fellowship, and a Schloss Solitude Residency Fellowship. sumell’s work invites us to imagine a landscape without prisons. She is based in New Orleans, Louisiana where she continues to work on Herman’s House, Solitary Gardens, The Prisoner’s Apothecary+, and several other community generated, advocacy-based projects.

The Lower Eastside Girls Club (LESGC) supports young women and gender-expansive youth of color throughout New York City in leveraging their inner power to shape a better future for themselves, their community, and the world. Through free, year-round, innovative programming they connect young people with their passions, celebrate their curiosity, and channel their creative energy. Together, they are building a just and equitable future filled with “Joy. Power. Possibility.”

Growing Abolition is presented as part of PS1 COURTYARD: an experiment in creative ecologies.
Growing Abolition is organized by Jody Graf and Elena Ketelsen Gonzalez, Assistant Curators, MoMA PS1.