Learning with and from Plants in Growing Abolition
Jessica Santone
Email: jessica.santone@csueastbay.edu
Image above: jackie sumell and Lower Eastside Girls Club, Installation view of Growing Abolition, 21 July 2022. Photo courtesy of jackie sumell.
Abstract
Growing Abolition is an ongoing project of public pedagogy that demonstrates how plant life offers metaphors and models for abolition of the prison industrial complex. It is led by New Orleans-based artist jackie sumell, in collaboration with various groups and organizations, and includes mutual aid greenhouses, public tea parties, classes and workshops, herbal medicine carts, and a publication. One component of the project was a collaboration with the Lower Eastside Girls Club (LESGC) at MoMA PS1 in Queens, NY during the summers of 2021 and 2022, culminating in the exhibition Freedom to Grow at PS1 in winter 2022-23. Young people from LESGC received stipends as interns to participate in learning about gardening and abolition through various workshops. In summer-fall 2022 as part of the Life Between Buildings exhibition, they installed a garden in the museum courtyard to help foster public imagination for an abolitionist landscape. The garden was anchored by a ‘solitary greenhouse’ modeled on the dimensions of a solitary prison cell. In this way, the project connected to sumell’s ongoing public artwork Solitary Gardens (since 2013), in which community members construct gardens shaped as solitary cells with plantings designed by incarcerated individuals through written correspondence.
In this essay, I analyze sumell’s collaboration with LESGC, with particular attention to its pedagogical approach. Many garden-based pedagogical art projects have used critical pedagogical approaches to broaden understanding of ecological knowledge. These experimental pedagogies offer more expansive ways to view environmental justice. In this instance, Growing Abolition not only teaches about abolition, but does so through abolitionist pedagogy. I compare Growing Abolition with concepts described in Bettina L. Love’s We Want to Do More Than Survive (2019). Using principles of interdependence, joy, and slowness, the artwork prompts critical consideration about which human and other-than-human subjects are given abundant space and time to grow.
Introduction
What does it mean to learn from plants? In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, she describes the many ways that plants “teach us by example” (2013, p. 9). Her text draws connections between Indigenous knowledge and Western science to expand on how plants are teachers that show us how to share, collaborate, nourish, and support. Learning from plants is about honoring ancestors amongst our other-than-human kin – a matter of intergenerational and environmental justice. It entails moving beyond oppressive hierarchies that some believe are necessary for learning to instead understand knowledge-sharing through reciprocal care – care for learners and care for their plant-teachers.
In jackie sumell’s Growing Abolition, plants also teach us how to be free, promoting an abolitionist worldview that contrasts with the disciplinary regimes of our present.[1] The project casts plants as co-conspirators in the struggle to abolish the prison industrial complex (PIC), including all forms of imprisonment, policing, and surveillance. It includes mutual aid greenhouses, public tea parties, classes and workshops, herbal medicine carts, and the publication of a field guide. The project developed out of the ‘Social Justice Seed Packets’ that were an educational component of sumell’s earlier and ongoing Solitary Gardens (since 2013). This social practice project consists of 6 x 9-foot gardens modeled on the dimensions and furnishings of solitary prison cells in ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Colorado, with plantings designed by incarcerated individuals through correspondence with sumell, and planted and tended by volunteers on the outside. Both Solitary Gardens and Growing Abolition have involved multiple collaborating individuals and institutions. Most recently, Growing Abolition has grown into a newly formed non-profit organization, Freedom to Grow.
As Michelle Alexander and other researchers have shown, the contemporary prison industrial complex directly follows from the history of slavery and, in the US, where per capita incarceration is amongst the highest in the world, incarceration permits the continued legal practice of slavery under the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution (2010, p. 31). Contemporary abolitionist movement seeks to end incarceration and reliance on prisons and policing, but also aims to eradicate other forms of harm, including those found in most educational institutions. As multiple abolitionists have counseled, abolition is not just about getting rid of these systems of harm, but also about creating something new. As Mariame Kaba writes, “PIC abolition is a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more” (2021a, p. 216).
One component of the larger Growing Abolition project was a collaboration with the Lower Eastside Girls Club (LESGC) and Museum of Modern Art PS1 (hereafter: PS1) in Queens, New York in 2021-22. LESGC is a not-for-profit group that serves young women and gender-expansive youth of color from across New York City. Over two summers, jackie sumell and the young folks of LEGSC investigated parallels between plant growth and abolition through growing herbs and flowers, workshops, guest lectures, podcasting, zine-making, and more. In summer 2022, as part of two overlapping group exhibitions, PS1 COURTYARD: an experiment in creative ecologies and Life Between Buildings, they installed a greenhouse and garden in the PS1 courtyard. This ‘Solitary greenhouse’ was modeled on the ‘blueprint’ (dimensions) of a solitary prison cell, a striped down version of the design of Solitary Gardens. It was surrounded by ‘snapshot’ planting containers started for community garden partners elsewhere in New York City. The project concluded with an exhibition, Freedom to Grow, in the museum’s Homeroom gallery. Plants were installed along a windowed wall in the gallery; vitrines in the center of the room contained collages, flower pressings, and other remnants of the LEGSC workshops, and the large eastern wall showcased a ‘vineline’ of digital photo collages and hand-painted luffa leaves documenting the project’s development of relationships and growth.
In this essay, I examine this aspect of Growing Abolition at PS1, briefly situating it in relation to earlier pedagogical art projects that view plants as teachers, and looking closely at the documentation of the project to more fully understand its pedagogical approach. I argue that Growing Abolition not only includes an abolitionist curriculum, but also deploys an abolitionist pedagogy. By comparing sumell’s work with the writing of education scholar Bettina L. Love, we can see how interdependence, joy, and slowness are core aspects of this pedagogical approach in sumell’s work. These features show a particular mode of learning from plants and invite the public into an expansive understanding of interlinked social, racial, intergenerational, multispecies, and environmental justice.
Broadening Ecological Knowledge through Pedagogical Art Gardens
Pedagogical art is a type of social practice that uses teaching and learning as form – including workshops, performative lectures, alternative schools, and the like. Although it occasionally overlaps with art education, pedagogical art differs fundamentally as a type of creative intervention into ways of knowing or forms of teaching, and its subject matter contents rarely focus on art practice and more frequently address types of knowledges that are excluded or given lesser what in conventional education contexts. Pedagogical art is closely related to public pedagogy and often sited outside of traditional school contexts. One interesting subset of pedagogical art is expressed through gardens – as sites of learning and subjects of expanding ecological knowledge.
Pedagogical art gardens typically include experiential learning and a focus on plant care and relationships within a larger ecology. Silvia Bottinelli considers some of these projects in her 2024 text Artists and the Practice of Agriculture. In one section of the book, she addresses pedagogical art gardens, arguing that these echo the interdisciplinary thinking of food pedagogies; she focuses on case studies that “enable connections between humans and other-than-human beings in order to revise oppressive histories, and they propose new paradigms by taking responsibility and caring for a particular place or community.” (2024, p. 198). Many of these have environmental justice aims, which can be understood broadly to encompass: remediating ecosystems to improve human and other-than-human health, as in Mel Chin’s Revival Field (1991-ongoing); addressing issues of food security, as in Seitu Jones’s Frogtown Farm (2013-ongoing); and spatial justice projects for community revitalization, like Juan William Chávez’s Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary (2012). Bottinelli’s text functions primarily as a compendium of practices in an emerging field, inviting further interpretation of the specifics of works and artists she introduces. In particular, American ecofeminist artist Bonnie Ora Sherk’s work with pedagogical art gardens, including Crossroads Community (The Farm) (1974-87) and A Living Library (1981-ongoing), provides an interesting point of comparison with jackie sumell’s work in Growing Abolition, with these practices sharing some key elements, but the latter diverging in its explicit address of abolition.
The Farm was one of the earliest examples of a pedagogical art garden. Located in abandoned lots under a freeway interchange in San Francisco, California, Sherk and her collaborators transformed these into a temporary greenspace for performance and picnics. The project quickly evolved into a multi-year community garden, with workshops, school field trips, interspecies performance art / living environments, and other forms of ecological collaboration (Blankenship, 2011; Weintraub, 2012; Woynarski, 2020). Sherk’s pedagogical approach during The Farm years was characterized by emerging interest in ecological thinking and the self as ecological subject, following anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s 1972 Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
By the 1980s, energies, personalities, and city politics had shifted and Sherk’s attention turned towards a new project that she would pursue until her passing in 2021: A Living Library (A.L.L.). Originally proposed for Bryant Park near New York Public Library, Sherk’s plan for an integrated learning garden was realized in 1998 as a collaboration with the OMI/Excelsior public school campus in San Francisco. There, the artist specifically aimed to transform what she described as a “prison-like” concrete campus of minority-serving public school through a community planning process with students, parents, faculty, and city representatives. On the school site, new plantings were articulated into discrete learning ‘zones,’ like the Native Riparian Ecology Zone and the Visual & Performing Arts Zone, which invited different sensory experiences and forms of exploration. This constituted a unique approach to place-based learning that promoted interdisciplinary and non-hierarchical thinking. The project later expanded to other sites, including one continued location on Roosevelt Island in New York City. In recent years, the San Francisco arm of the project focused on repairing the in-filled Islais Creek watershed, directing activities for young people around this task.
Often referred by its acronym, A.L.L. focused on the radical parity and interconnectedness of all diverse human and nonhuman organisms (Heartney, 2020). Critic Eleanor Heartney discusses how works like this convey a type of feminism tied to ecological principles that “centers on the interconnections of society, nature, and the cosmos” (2020, p. 40). Education scholars Lara Harvester and Sean Blenkinsop have characterized ecofeminist pedagogy through its use of dialogue to resist hierarchical relationships and forms of domination in learning, its attention to the sustainability of learning spaces, and its advocacy for eco-social justice that challenges patriarchy as well as racism and speciesism (2010, p. 125-28). In A Living Library, Sherk’s ecofeminist pedagogy approached “everything and everyone is one organism” and proposed “education [as] an ecological system” (Sardar, 2005). She intended that all participants would gain empathy from working together and viewing plants as teachers.
A Living Library and Growing Abolition share a focus on learning from plants, experiential learning, and interconnectedness. They broaden environmental knowledge by inviting young people into relationship with plants and expanding the multidisciplinary ways of knowing plant life. Importantly, they both make use of institutional partnerships, insisting on structural transformation, and pushing these entities to extend greater justice and offer improved resources to communities and individuals that have been resource-denied. Both sought to activate institutional spaces to encourage growth, learning, and healing for humans and other-than-humans. For example, PS1 is on the site of a former nineteenth century school, with a 1997 brutalist courtyard that echoes late-twentieth century school building; the ‘solitary greenhouse’ installation was the result of careful collaboration between curators and the artist to bring sumell’s Solitary Garden concept to the museum, without triggering harm for viewers by placing a replica of a prison cell against a backdrop that resembles a prison-yard (sumell, 2024b)s. Growing Abolition was also part of a broader curatorial effort to challenge the modernist affiliation of their institution through fostering greater collaborations with Brooklyn and Queens community organizations (González, 2023).
Unlike Sherk’s ecofeminist project, Growing Abolition also asks: “What can plants teach us about abolition, healing, and expanding our horizons of possibility?” (sumell, 2024a). The slow ambition of Growing Abolition includes the dismantling of systemic violence, whether the prison industrial complex or schools that provide a pipeline to it. Workshops about herbal teas and gardening days happened alongside discussions of texts about abolition and reflections on how the flowers they pressed and archived related to freedom. Where A Living Library occasionally put young people’s learning in service of healing ecosystems, sumell’s project puts plant growth in service of healing society and human relationships. Growing Abolition proposes spiritual and theoretical engagement with plants that is both rooted in their basic needs and, metaphorically, goes deeper. Through its use of abolitionist pedagogy, metaphors of healing and freedom drawn from the plants are practiced and made real through the forms and relationships that develop in the project.
Countering Harm with Abolitionist Pedagogy
As noted above, the work of Growing Abolition grew out of sumell’s earlier Solitary Gardens. Her research on the prison industrial complex led her to extended correspondence with elders who were incarcerated, including political prisoner and Black Panther activist Herman Wallace, who spent over 40 years in solitary confinement for a wrongful conviction. From this work, and in honor of Wallace, who died in 2013, three days after he was released from prison, sumell created a series of gardens modeled on the standard size of solitary confinement cells with plantings designed by incarcerated folks. Each of the Solitary Gardens has a base made with a carbon-neutral ‘revolutionary mortar’ composed of sugarcane, cotton, and tobacco, plus limestone and water – the first three ingredients were key cash crops of chattel slavery and so connect this legacy with its evolution in modern incarceration (Croegaert, 2021). The mortar forms the frame of the small cell as well as sculpted scale models of the immovable furniture that constrict that space. Over time, the mortar breaks down – as sumell describes, it is “overpowered by plant life, proving that nature—like hope, love, and imagination—will ultimately triumph over the harm humans impose on ourselves and on the planet” (sumell, 2024a).
All of sumell’s current practice is rooted in honoring her elders and gratitude to Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and others who have shared their experiences of incarceration. But the pedagogical dimensions of this practice emerge from a need to share these lessons and out of “respect for patience as it relates to where people are art” in their journeys to embrace PIC abolition (sumell, 2024b). For sumell, abolition is about relationship. Describing how plants are teachers, she has said:
This relationship of teacher as beloved and teacher as source of wonder and teacher place to land or place to go or teacher as elder, teacher as sacred, is really important. If we practice that with nettle, we are strengthening the possibility that we can see that in condemned human beings. Maybe the more radical and more left of us don’t need that as a rehearsal dinner, but I would say that the vast majority of people do. If we are learning to build deep and profound connections – with plants in these case, we are creating a pathway to be able to do that with those who are condemned to the worst of our collective humanity – people who have killed others and are just seen as a thing and not as a person. That is the work that I do, in its essence – to be able to strengthen love through practice and through the imagination – to be able to love faster. (sumell, 2024b)
As she puts it, teachers are those we learn from and respect. Her description here articulates a fundamentally different relationship of pupil to teacher than is common in most (disciplinary) educational contexts, pointing to the importance of abolitionist pedagogy.
Abolitionist pedagogy is an emerging approach to teaching and learning that aims to dismantle systems of oppression within and beyond education institutions. Scholars and practitioners of abolitionist pedagogy acknowledge the shared disciplinary histories of prisons and schools; and they build equally on scholarship and practice of culturally competent pedagogies and abolitionist activisms outside of educational contexts. In We Want to Do More Than Survive, Bettina L. Love interweaves episodes of her personal educational story, long histories of abolitionist struggles, and critical analysis of the state of education in the United States, particularly K-12 (primary and secondary) education (2019). Love positions abolitionist pedagogy in opposition to both dominant forms of education and common educational reforms, which comprise what she calls an “educational survival complex” that only offers a further form of disciplinarity (2019, p. 27). As Love describes it, abolitionist pedagogy requires imagination, intergenerational knowledge, and solidarity. She situates present day efforts as continuous with the “freedom dreaming” of abolitionist ancestors from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (2019, p. 101).
Abolitionist pedagogy also centers joy and wellness. Love particularly emphasizes the distinction joy in general and “Black joy,” which is “a celebration of taking back your identity as a person of color” (2019, p. 120). Here, she expands on bell hooks’ insistence on joy and well-being in a pedagogy of freedom in Teaching to Transgress (hooks, 1994). hooks focuses on embodied pedagogy and embodied learning, pointing to the way that teachers and students are most engaged when they have the freedom to bring their whole selves to the classroom. Following in the footsteps of bell hooks, for Love, “abolitionist teaching is not just about tearing down and building up but also about the joy necessary to be in solidarity with others, knowing that your struggle for freedom is constant but that there is beauty in the camaraderie of creating a just world” (2019, p. 120).
Like other abolitionist educators, Love has stressed how PIC abolition is a practice that must extend beyond the classroom, in a broader struggle to abolish White supremacy and institutions of violence, including schools and prisons. Mariame Kaba makes similar arguments in her 2021 book, We Do This Til We Free Us, a series of essays, interviews, and talks that articulate a need for transformative justice, for building communities of collective care and societies where needs are met. Kaba stresses that this is slow work, building on the work of ancestors and setting things up for generations to continue the struggle beyond (2021, p. 69).
What Love, hooks, and Kaba all describe is a slow, gentle, but deliberate practice of teaching as an act of care. Although it connects to other forms of critical pedagogy, abolitionist pedagogy involves particular strategies that center freedom and dismantling systems of harm. In the following sections, I look at three attributes: mutualism and interdependence, joy, and slowness, as these manifest in Growing Abolition. Studying the documentation of the project shows how abolitionist pedagogy is deployed in teaching the Lower Eastside Girls Club participant-collaborators about abolition as a strategy for undoing harm and embracing freedom.
Mutualism and Interdependence
Mutualism is a biological term for a situation where two or more species each provide the other(s) with benefits through their interaction. It is similar to symbiosis, a broader term that also encompasses one-sided relationships. Interdependence in a biological context refers to the way that species depend on one another and on their environments for existence and survival. These biological concepts are relevant when we look closely at the inner workings of a garden, and they apply more broadly as well as we think about the interconnectedness of humans and other-than-humans on our planet. Consider how yarrow is described as a companion plant to various herbs in the online Abolitionist Apothecary sumell and LESGC produced for the project:
In the garden, Yarrow makes an excellent companion plant for most herbs as it enhances the oils and vitality of other plants. […] Yarrow’s ability to encourage others growth and support other plants on their journey without desire for recognition or reward is part of what makes it an excellent companion plant. How can plants like yarrow inspire us to be both enhancing to others and maintain healthy boundaries for ourselves? How does that relate to your understanding of companionship or community? (sumell, 2024a)
In a movement context, mutualism, or mutual aid, is the community sharing of resources, often considered important for building more just social structures. Interdependence is important for abolitionist movement and pedagogy – seeking to dismantle systems of domination goes hand in hand with recognizing humans’ shared humanity in particular. In this regard, abolitionist pedagogy closely aligns with ecofeminist pedagogy, that similarly stresses the importance of recognizing ecological interconnectedness as a way of undoing hierarchical and binary thinking.
Growing Abolition showcases mutualism and interdependence in both the content and form of the project. The young people from LESGC studied the mutualism of plants in the garden, viewing these as powerful metaphors for healthy human relationships. The project at PS1 was also structured through a web of relationships small and large – between the collaborators and with incarcerated individuals, abolitionist scholars, community partners, and the museum.
Collaborative working and learning were essential to Growing Abolition, as necessary components of gardening, and fundamental to an abolition pedagogy that doesn’t position teachers as powerful experts over students. LESGC and sumell are given equal credit for the PS1 exhibition and the components of Growing Abolition that they developed together, with many instances of lifting up the young people’s voices and centering their ideas. In one of the vitrines of the Freedom to Grow (2022-23) exhibition, a drawing of a dahlia paired with a young person’s sketched self-portrait includes the message “A dahlia needs support structures to grow, it needs water and attention just like me. My parents provide this all to me.” Another young person labeled their drawing of sage leaves with a message of intergenerational justice: “My mother inspires me to value my education […] Utilizing the lessons of our elders is essential to abolition.” In both of these drawings, each held down with abstractly shaped seed-bombs, the participants have been invited to draw comparisons between systems of care they have received and those that plants need to thrive. Their budding relationships with plants in the garden became a way of thinking about systems of care more broadly.
Building community and connecting LESGC participants with community partnerships was important for the Growing Abolition project too. Multiple images documenting the project show teenagers smiling, chatting, laughing, with their hands dirty making seed bombs, flower-based dyed clothing, teas, and drawings. In the collage that made up the main wall of the Freedom to Grow exhibition, hand-drawn luffa leaves and vines were interspersed with quick digital photo collages made by jackie sumell. This ‘vineline’ charted the affective connections of the project rather than its linear development. Within the collage are dynamic and playful experiments with scale and form: close-up images of hands hold smaller-scaled photographs of people; young people appear to sprout from hand-drawn bushy leaves; full-length bodies rise out of planting containers. These visual connections echo the artist’s concern for relationship in the work of abolition. The use of luffa leaves and vines was important too; sumell has described its mutualism with morning glory in an Instagram post: “If you look closely you can see the luffa holding onto a less strong morning glory vine pulling them up the wall like ‘this way to freedom kiddo…’” (2022c). Some of the photos in the vineline document partnering activities with TGFA (Thank God For Abortion), an organization with whom LESGC planted herbs that promote healing and accessible healthcare, Slow Factory, a climate innovation lab and climate justice education organization, and Green Guerrillas, an organization that helped inaugurate guerrilla gardening in the 1970s in lower Manhattan.
Joy
It is especially in the image-based documentation of Growing Abolition that joy can be found, and not just in the flowering plants adding color to the concrete PS1 courtyard as they stretched outside in the summer sun. Inside the purple risograph-printed zine produced by LESGC and jackie sumell, one finds the same kind of playful multi-scaled collaging that appeared on the ‘vineline’ installation. In one image, a mural painted on a garden shed takes center stage. It reads, ‘Destruction Creates New Spaces To Grow.’ To the left, a girl is visible from the waist up, painting the mural, but sumell’s collaging placing her torso at a 90-degree angle to the mural. She is also larger than life relative to the garden shed. To the right, a pair of giant hands (each larger than the figure to the left) holds a fan of polaroid images of mural painting, including an image of the mural. Above, the whole group of collaborators is pictured standing or crouching below a large tree for a portrait. This collage typifies the style of the project and its documentation. Scale, shape, and composition perform freely and wildly, as a suggestion of the freedom and wildness of two summers of LESGC’s joyous learning with and from plants. Elsewhere in the zine, descriptions of plants appear with tight text-wrapping alongside pressed leaves and flowers, turning written passages into biomorphic shapes.
Abolitionist’s Tea Parties were an important part of the project’s use of joy in pedagogy. Most days of workshops and gardening during Growing Abolition concluded with tea parties that connected the healing lessons of plants with the plants’ literal healing properties. Several workshops series within the project focused on healing and self-care, including making herbal medicines like tinctures and salves, as essential to abolition. Such activities encouraged the young people to see the movement for PIC abolition as a more holistic revisioning of society, and to embrace joy and pleasure as part of that revisioning.
Many of the handwritten documents archiving the LESGC workshops also show a joyous playfulness. One text describes an admired elder, comparing her to a cactus (if she were a plant) because she “aged slowly : )” and “provides for others” (Freedom to Grow, 2022-23). A marker-colored drawing of cactus in a pot sits below the text between various doodles of hearts. In the same vitrine, one of the seed-bombs has its seeds pressed into the shape of a face. On a draft for mural ideas, Samiyyah Lawson writes: “I would like to see bright colorful flower beds honestly. This garden can empower people to be free. I feel like I can do anything” (Freedom to Grow, 2022-23). On another page, an unsigned draft of a poem written in heavy marker reads: “IN THE NEW WORLD… young black kids run around with full mind, full bellies + full minds” (Freedom to Grow, 2022-23).
Playing with seeds, plants, dirt, and new friends creates an atmosphere of pleasure and freedom. As Bettina L. Love observes, abolitionist pedagogy makes room for joy, especially types of joy that celebrate Black youth and youth of color, who may not see their whole selves celebrated in the broader culture. What sumell brings into being in Growing Abolition is a wildly playful space for learning with and from plants. It is one that offers a radical alternative of growth, fun, and wholeness to the challenging lessons of struggle against systems of oppression and violence that comprise the project’s curriculum. Growing Abolition included engagement with sometimes difficult content, such as a phone interview with incarcerated activist Timothy Young. The event resonated deeply with the young people, who multiple times across the documentation share their dismay at his recounting of not seeing a tree during 24 years of incarceration. A pedagogy that centers joy is important to the work of imagining other systems of accountability and repair.
Slowness (and Patience)
Abolition is a process and a practice that requires slowness and patience, just as gardening does. In conversation with jackie sumell for the zine Freedom to Grow, Abril Macapia defined abolition as healing, saying:
It’s important to take time away from what you’re working on and just heal yourself and take a break. Once you’ve allowed yourself to breathe and to be happy, then you’re already taking a step towards creating a better, less prison-focused world. Healing yourself takes patience, and abolition takes patience (Lower Eastside Girls Club and j. sumell, 2022, n.p. [5]).
Repeatedly throughout the documentation of the project, sumell notes how one of her goals and challenges was to keep the pace of the project slow and let things develop organically. The plants teach this slowness and require it for their basic needs. Seeds need time to germinate, and plants need time to develop enough that they produce new seeds, which can then be shared with community gardens, made into seed bombs, or given to PS1 visitors. In The Abolitionist Field Guide, sumell writes, “The current justice system leaves no space for human complexity. Abolitionist pedagogy challenges us to create spaces for rival truths and competing dualities” (2022b, n.p. [17]). Making space for complexity requires patience and care. Growing Abolition required and practiced slowness as the LESGC interns came gradually to greater understanding of the possibilities of abolition. On the website for the project, sumell quotes Mariame Kaba who has said, “Abolition moves at the speed of trust” (sumell, 2024).
One vitrine in the Freedom to Grow exhibition documented the first summer of the two-year project with snapshots of mural painting and gardening, with an explanatory text by intern Emily Gamble describing how they built a garden and decorated a garden shed at Queensbridge Houses, a nearby public housing community where some of the girls lived. She writes: “Although a lot of what we learned and created dealt with the Prison Industrial Complex and its impact on different groups of people, we understand that work done on a smaller scale was just as important as work done on a larger scale.” This valuing of small-scale change and development is a key part of the slowness and patience expressed throughout the project.
Abolition and gardens can both begin as something small. As Paradise Ocean Phoenix wrote in their contribution to the zine, “we’ve talked about how everything starts with a seed, like all the plants on the rooftop garden, or even an idea” (Lower Eastside Girls Club and j. sumell, 2022, n.p. [12]). Growing Abolition offers a radically modest approach, inviting people sometimes one at a time to embrace the possibility of abolition through the process of transforming individuality and competition into collectivity and care through gardening. Although modest, this might be the only way to respond to systems of harm without creating more harm. Plants teach unknowable possibility from small beginnings, and growth in directions and colors and scales that can be predicted, but not predetermined. As sumell wrote at the conclusion of the project with LEGSC:
I am pumped about all the ways the natural world teaches us about abolition and liberation. Plants teach us to be better people. If we are willing to listen we can learn so much about ourselves, our relationships and our planet through the lived experience of the plant kingdom. (sumell, 2022a)
Conclusion
Growing Abolition deploys the gentleness of plant-teachers as a way to invite people to the work of abolition. It not only teaches about abolition, but uses an abolitionist pedagogy centering interdependence, joy, and slowness to prompt us to think more about who or what is given abundant space and time to teach, learn, and grow. It is a project of patience and imagination. In the Growing Abolition project, jackie sumell pays particular attention to the weeds. As she writes in The Abolitionist Field Guide: “People convicted of crimes in the US are often treated like the weeds of our society – ignored, dismissed, or even eradicated” (2022b, n.p. [14]). On the following page, the reader is introduced to the Bidens Pilosa, a medicine often regarded as a weed, and invited to view this and other so-called weeds differently, with greater complexity and more curiosity. Undoing systems of domination and violence includes dismantling speciesism too.
In her writing on prison gardens, Elizabeth Lara has argued that abolition is a matter of multispecies justice, describing it as “acutely concerned with responding to the needs of those most impacted by policing and incarceration through designing and building socioecological relationships and systems of support which make prison and its adjacent institutions unnecessary” (2022, p. 105). She proposes an analysis that interweaves social concerns and ecological concerns, continuing: “No matter how expansive, an ecological consciousness and imagination delimited by the logics of the prison-industrial complex remains damaging” (Lara, 2022, p. 107). What Growing Abolition seeds through its abolitionist pedagogy is an imagination for a non-carceral landscape built on relationship and healing. It proposes a more complex and more interconnected form of environmental justice.
[1] In resistance to the norms of white heteropatriarchy, the artist does not capitalize her name (Groner, 2019).
About the author
Jessica Santone is Associate Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at Cal State East Bay. Her current research concerns pedagogical art and social practice projects that expand environmental knowledge and climate justice. Her research has appeared in journals including Performance Research, Visual Resources, CSPA Quarterly, and RACAR.
References
A Living Library (2024) A Living Library. Available at: alivinglibrary.org [Accessed: 21 January 2024].
Alexander, M. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press.
Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Northvale, NJ; London: Jason Aronson, Inc.
Blankenship, J. (2011) The Farm by the Freeway. In: E. Auther and A. Lerner, eds., West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bottinelli, S. (2024) Artists and the Practice of Agriculture: Politics and Aesthetics of Food Sovereignty in Art since 1960. London: Routledge.
Croegaert, A. (2021) Solitary Gardens. Southern Cultures, 27(3). Available at: www.southerncultures.org/article/solitary-gardens/ [Accessed: 15 August 2023].
Groner, A. (2019) The Solitary Garden. Orion Magazine, 23 September. orionmagazine.org:443/article/the-solitary-garden/ [Accessed: 15 August 2023].
Harvester, L. and Blenkinsop, S. (2010) Environmental Education and Ecofeminist Pedagogy:
Bridging the Environmental and the Social. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 15, pp. 120-34.
Heartney, E. (2020) All or Nothing. Art in America, 108(5), pp. 40-49.
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge.
Kaba, M. (2021a) The Journey Continues. In: C. Kaepernick, ed., Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future without Policing & Prisons. New York: Kaepernick Publishing.
Kaba, M. (2021b) We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transformative Justice. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Ketelsen González, E. (2023) The Museum and the Classroom: Spaces for Experimentation and Liberating Practices. La Escuela, 17 November. Available at: laescuela.art/en/campus/library/practices/the-museum-and-the-classroom-spaces-for-experimentation-and-liberating-practices-elena-ketelsen-gonzalez [Accessed 18 January 2024].
Lara, E. (2022) Prison Gardens and Growing Abolition. In: S. Chao, K. Bolender, and E. Kirksey, eds., The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 103-24.
Love, B. L. (2019) We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Boston: Beacon.
Lower Eastside Girls Club and j. sumell (2022) Freedom to Grow: The Lower Eastside Girls Club and jackie sumell. [zine] New York: MoMA PS1. Available online at: d1tcycker2ppj.cloudfront.net/content=type:attachment/ItT5qmdRRc6poDPbqWUM [Accessed: 4 February 2024].
Ramsey, A. (2023) jackie sumell. GIRLS Magazine 18, 3(2), pp. 20-28.
Romero-Marx, N. (2022) Abolitionist’s Tea Party | jackie s[u]mell. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX8x5QXzwwo [Accessed 28 October 2023].
Sardar, Z. (2005) Land Art / Living Truths / A performance artist-turned-educator sheds light on the Islais Creek. SF Gate, 22 May. Available at: www.sfgate.com/magazine/article/LAND-ART-Living-Truths-A-performance-2669001.php [Accessed: 6 February 2023].
Shillingford, A. (2024) The Abolitionist’s Field Guide: A Conversation with jackie sumell. MOLD Magazine, 6 March. Available at: thisismold.com/series/abolition/the-abolitionists-field-guide [Accessed 10 June 2024].
sumell, j. (2022a) jackie sumell’s Artist Diary: The Abolitionist’s Tea Party & Apothecary. Creative Capital Journal, 2 August. Available at: creative-capital.org/2022/08/02/jackie-sumells-artist-diary-the-abolitionists-tea-party-apothecary/ [Accessed: 23 December 2023].
sumell, j. (2022b) The Abolitionist Field Guide. New Orleans: Antenna.
sumell, j. (2022c) Arguably my favorite part of #GrowingAbolition @momaps1are the ways #Luffa shines [Instagram], 22 August. Available at: www.instagram.com/p/CgxnHb5L72f/ [Accessed: 30 June 2024].
sumell, j. (2024a) Growing Abolition. Available at: www.growingabolition.com [Accessed: 4 February 2024].
sumell, j. (2024b) Zoom conversation with author, 18 June.
Weintraub, L. (2012) Bonnie Ora Sherk: Urban Oasis. In: To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 105-10.
WGRL (2022) Growing Abolition with Mariame Kaba. [podcast] Interviewed on 17 November. Available at: wgrl.nyc/growing-abolition-with-mariame-kaba/ [Accessed: 13 December 2023].
Woynarski, L. (2020) Towards Radical Coexistence in the City: Performing the bio-urban in Bonnie Ora Sherk’s The Farm and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Flow City. Performance Research, 25(2), pp. 126-33.