About this Event
We invite you to join in fellowship at the intersection of therapeutic floral design and abolition in an afternoon of mindful engagement with flowers and in creating floral inspired mail for those inside and outside the walls. Come share the fruits of our collective spring gardens by bringing a bunch of your own cut blooms to contribute to communal buckets and create an arrangement to gift to a mother in your life or someone else’s–design tips provided.
Join us at the beginning for a brief presentation about the exhibit and the amazing work of the People’s Flower School before making a bouquet and card.
, founded by Becca Amos and Meredith Wheeler, facilitates Floral Therapy inside the Chesterfield County J*il. Therapeutic floral design programs are provided as a tool for self exploration and collective healing, challenging reductive stigmas of incarcerated people and inviting conversation about oppressive systems that deny those inside access to nature. PFS emphasizes the necessity of reimaging and redesign in the discourse about the role of nature in uprooting barriers to compassion and community building. Photographs, taken by Amy Robison, Sydnee Schorr, and Ethan Hickerson, depict the process, floral designs created by participants, portraits, and community reception.
This program is presented by Let’s Get Free: Ecologies of Care, Love & Abolition, an exhibition by People’s Paper Co-op at , May 1 through June 14, 2026. The exhibition features a robust series of workshops, events, and community conversations.
From 2014 - 2024 the People’s Paper Co-op used a collaborative and multidisciplinary process to work directly with communities in Philadelphia that were impacted by the criminal legal system. These projects reshaped the reductive and discriminatory stories that criminal records tell into creative projects and installations that imagined a future world beyond our broken systems. Their massive public art campaigns and exhibitions reached tens of thousands of viewers and their art raised over $240,000 to free Black moms and caregivers. For Mother’s Day 2026, the PPC is launching a book and exhibition focused on supporting, empowering, and expanding local abolitionist movements.
At a time when creative resistance is more urgent than ever, this exhibition places the work of the People’s Paper Co-op in conversation with over twenty years of liberatory cultural organizing projects by jackie sumell, The People’s Flower School, Planting Justice, and Dennis Williams II. In each project, the magical and transformative power of plants is used as a metaphor, vessel, and vehicle for imagining and building a more free future. Art works made from shredded criminal records and torn Pr*son uniforms, collaborative films, a decomposing Pr*son toilet/sink, and documentation of monumental public art installations are some of the many modes of expression viewers will encounter in this immersive exhibition.
Inspired by the visible beauty, nourishing decomposition, and invisible cooperation that foster healthy ecosystems, the exhibition showcases each project’s powerful art while lifting up the people, labor, and collaborative processes needed to produce them. Featuring an abundance of public programs, Let’s Get Free invites artists, organizers and visionaries to draw from these shared tools, strategies, and emergent practices to fuel their own movements.
Registration is not required, but encouraged.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
319 W Broad St, 319 West Broad Street, Richmond, United States
USD 0.00
