The Brooklyn Rail

Let’s Get Free: Ecologies of Care, Love & Abolition is a full-throated celebration of twenty years of liberatory cultural organizing. It includes the curators the People’s Paper Co-op (PPC) and fellow activists jackie sumell, The People’s Flower School, Planting Justice, and Dennis Williams II. In coordination with the exhibit, PPC had on hand copies of a book they just published also titled Let’s Get Free. The show is packed with photographs, wall text, installations, and artworks referring to the projects spanning those twenty years. Unifying Let’s Get Free is the rhizomatic theme of plants and ecosystems as metaphors of—and potent vehicles for—regeneration, empowerment, community, and resilience.

From 2014 to 2024, PPC, a collaboration between Richmond Virginia-based artists Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist, worked with communities in Philadelphia caught up in its broken criminal justice system. For Let’s Get Free, PPC installed hand-made paper sheets, hanging in rows against a red wall, each one made from a pulped criminal record with a polaroid of the person and a hand-written note expressing how they felt about having their criminal record expunged. These sheets were the fruit of a collaboration between PPC and Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity (PLSE) that designed a series of free legal clinics to help people either expunge or clean up their criminal records. Above one picture of a young woman with a pretty smile the note read: “Imagining my life without a criminal record is like thinking of a beautiful flower in a dark place finally being surrounded by sun and other beautiful flowers and growing to its fullest extent!” On the polaroid she wrote: “see me as a mother that CAN care about others!” The installation held scores of such testimonials about lives that had been given a new lease through the literal and figurative recycling of their criminal records.

jackie sumell, Planting Justice, and The People’s Flower School all work with incarcerated people. For Let’s Get Free, sumell created a sculpture, Flush the System (2026), made from biodegradable materials. Molded from a prison toilet/sink from a decommissioned Louisiana jail, Flush the System recalls sumell’s long-standing abolitionist project, The House that Herman Built, with Herman Wallace, a member of the “Angola 3” who lived in solitary confinement for over forty years. On the wall behind the sculpture is a mural of Wallace’s cell. Infused with seeds and mushroom plugs, Flush the System is designed to break down, transforming an emblem of punishment into a site of renewal.

Planting Justice is a collaboration begun in 2020 between Kate DeCiccio, Hiroyo Kaneko, and Malaya Tuyay that involves their East Oakland, California nursery and creative workshops with imprisoned people to develop skills in growing food. In addition to flags extolling the virtues of gardening with slogans like “Plants teach us patience,” Planting Justice’s installation included photographs of workers in the nursery among the loquats and the pomegranate trees. Today, thanks to Planting Justice, there are over a thousand fruit trees planted in backyards across deep East Oakland.

The People’s Flower School, founded by Becca Amos and Meredith Wheeler, in 2024, provides the Floral Therapy process to participants in the HARP addiction recovery program in the Chesterfield County Jail in Virginia. This includes horticultural therapy through floral design, an evidence-based healing technique that fosters mindfulness in a communal setting. In the show, there were examples of dried flower arrangements and stunning photographs by Amy Robison, Sydnee Schorr, Ethan Hickerson of flower arrangements on black backgrounds. Some of these photographs appeared in a 2025 show, The Shadow of a Petal: Floral Design Inside the County Jail at Richmond’s Branch Museum of Design. The show helped raise thousands of dollars for the HARP program.

Dennis Williams II, PhD is a Research Associate at the University of Virginia and an adjunct professor at Virginia State University. Williams fuses activism into his role as an academic to develop, as he puts it in his UVA bio, “educational systems grounded in freedom, justice, care, and collective well-being.” His piece, A Taxonomy of Our Liberation (2026), takes up the front window of the gallery with a full-sized diorama of a forest floor. Through a couple of headsets at the front desk, the visitor can listen to Williams reading a poem in a soothing, conversational tone. The ensemble has a grounding effect. A healthy forest has a rich network of mutually beneficial relationships maintained by cycles of growth, decomposition, and regeneration. What better metaphor for the goals of liberatory social organizing?

The participants of Let’s Get Free wield aesthetics to amplify their social actions. Their successful projects are there for other artists and organizers to emulate, planting seeds, if you will, for a more just future.