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Precious Okoyomon On Play and the Garden as a Revolution of Tenderness

A garden of pollinators and perennials hosts native and invasive species. A giant teddy bear slide invites play. Resonant poetry competes with the sounds of the city. This is 'Among The Flowers I Learned to Love: A Garden of Decreation,' the celebrated Nigerian-American artist's MoMA PS1 courtyard commission.

A garden of pollinators and perennials, twisting with native and invasive plants. A giant teddy bear slide inviting play. Resonant poetry competes with the sounds of the city. This is ‘Among The Flowers I Learned to Love: A Garden of Decreation,’ artist Precious Okoyomon’s MoMA PS1 courtyard commission. The artist, who uses they/them pronouns, comes from a lineage of matriarchal seed savers; they were introduced to plant life by their grandmother, who migrated from Nigeria to Texas to help care for them after their own migration with their mother. She arrived with seeds, and those seeds became her garden in a new place.

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“The way she spent time with me was by having me take care of her garden,” Okoyomon tells Observer. They describe their grandmother’s character as stern, serious and headteacher-like, but in the garden, she could be tender. “My grandmother was the leader, and her garden was her kingdom. That’s where I learned how to tend, that was the only place she showed love.”

Okoyomon’s mother, who worked endless hours as a nurse, also made time to care for houseplants. This tenderness through gardening turned what began as a chore into a relationship with the natural world and a deep connection with ecological memory—the idea that nature holds cultural continuity that humans carry across displacement.........

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