{"id":309721,"date":"2026-07-30T12:22:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T12:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/309721\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T12:22:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T12:22:10","slug":"why-precious-okoyomon-planted-a-small-forest-in-new-york-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/309721\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Precious Okoyomon Planted a Small Forest in New York City"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Estimated4 min read<\/p>\n

Precious Okoyomon spent some of the hottest days of this summer outside. The 33-year-old artist and poet toiled under the sun for weeks to prepare their MoMA PS1 Courtyard Commission, planting trees and wildflowers in their new garden in front of the museum. In the work, a 25-foot-long teddy bear\u2014a signature of the artist\u2014nestles among some 50 trees and more than 1,500 perennials and annuals. This \u201clabor of love,\u201d as they call it, functions as a sanctuary in a world troubled by climate change and rampant instability.<\/p>\n

The resulting garden, Among the Flowers I Learned to Love, A Garden of Decreation (2026), joins a growing list of garden installations planted by Okoyomon. They constructed a garden for last year\u2019s Bienal de S\u00e3o Paulo and seeded a rooftop garden at the Aspen Art Museum in 2022. But this time, the garden\u2019s location imbues the space with a new tenderness, a space Okoyomon intends to frequent after it opens to the public on July 31.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is so special because I\u2019m here in New York; it\u2019s my home, and I have a real relationship to it because I\u2019m going to be here every day,\u201d Okoyomon says. \u201cI have an actual relationship and proximity to the garden. It\u2019s so extremely hyper specific to everything that I love, and over such a long scale of time, it\u2019s going to evolve so differently.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ruba Katrib, the chief curator at MoMA PS1, says that a project \u201cof this scale and inventiveness\u201d is the perfect fit for an artist like Okoyomon. \u201cPart of my ambition is to create a sense of wonder for our visitors\u2014an experience that transforms our campus while pushing the boundaries and expectations of what outdoor art can be,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\"APhoto: John Kim<\/p>\n

Among the Flowers I Learned to Love, A Garden of Decreation (2026) at MoMA PS1<\/p>\n

Okoyomon sourced the title of the work from two inspirations: Friedrich H\u00f6lderlin\u2019s poem \u201cWhen I Was a Boy\u201d and French philosopher Simone Weil\u2019s concept of \u201cdecreation,\u201d a term meaning the undoing of the self. H\u00f6lderlin\u2019s poem starts with the line: \u201cWhen I was a boy \/ a god would often rescue me \/ from the shouting and the violence of humans \/ Then, safe and well, I would play \/ with the flowers on the meadow \/ and heaven\u2019s breezes would play with me.\u201d Okoyomon hopes their garden can offer the same spiritual reprieve, a space where people can fall calmly into \u201cthe arms of the gods,\u201d as the poem concludes. \u201cI fell in love with that H\u00f6lderlin poem because of this restructuring of what the human is, because even men can\u2019t understand men; it always returns to the Earth,\u201d they say.<\/p>\n

Weil\u2019s \u201cdecreation\u201d concept comes into play via the oversized teddy bear, on its own titled The Pleasure Principle (2026). The term refers to shedding your ego, breaking down preconceived structures that suffocate or taint your view of the world. The bear features a slide, requiring visitors to climb into its rectum and pop out into the garden. For the artist, the slide symbolizes process. \u201cThe dream is the digestion; the brain is the second gut,\u201d they explain. All the while, a new poem by the artist, inspired by Jungian analysis, will play on loudspeakers around the slide.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve made a giant teddy bear, and I\u2019m asking you to let go and climb the steps into its butt and slide into it and listen to this weird magical poem I wrote that\u2019s going to make you a little uncomfortable and scared, and you\u2019re gonna have to crawl your way out of it,\u201d they say. \u201cI\u2019m asking you to let go in a different way, and how you come out, you\u2019ll be changed, and then you\u2019re spit out into this weird garden. You can smell these funky flowers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond this psychological experiment, Okoyomon grapples with the reality of climate change. The environment actively changes around us, and the garden emerges as a blueprint for what a more resilient version of New York\u2019s plant life could look like as the seasons continue to fluctuate drastically. \u201cIt\u2019s this very weird forest of things that I believe should grow in New York City, one that will make sense for climate change as we continue to have the hottest and coolest summers,\u201d they say. In that way, the space is simultaneously a sanctuary and a warning call.<\/p>\n

\"APhoto: John Kim<\/p>\n

The Pleasure Principle (2026) at MoMA PS1<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do need a lot of birch here. We need fruit trees. We need to rethink what our undergrowth looks like in New York,\u201d they explain. \u201cA lot of things we consider invasives are actually adapting rapidly to meet where we\u2019re at, so much of that is in the garden. It\u2019s a lot of things that you would consider weeds, a lot of wildflowers that we have cultivated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Okoyomon remains oddly optimistic about the future. On our call, they offer a reframe of the fact that each summer seems to be our hottest ever: instead, they say this is the \u201ccoldest\u201d summer we\u2019ll have moving forward. This might first read as cynical\u2014I thought so, too\u2014but really, the artist underscores how we still have time to change things, something they intend to show us in the garden. A Garden of Decreation will allow us to observe what\u2019s possible for the future, right alongside the artist.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time you come to it again, it\u2019ll change,\u201d they say. \u201cIt\u2019ll always be changing, and you\u2019ll change inside of that, and your experience will change. It\u2019s a special fragment of possibility. \u2026 The thing about being a gardener is it\u2019s a practice of futurity,\u201d they say. \u201cI\u2019m always planting a seed that I don\u2019t know how it\u2019s going to happen\u2014that\u2019s the miracle.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"4 min read Precious Okoyomon spent some of the hottest days of this summer outside. The 33-year-old artist…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[76189,1380,117139,569,83931,568,9,24,55,54,56,56762,117138,108292,76188],"class_list":["post-309721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-books-music","tag-content-type-feature","tag-contentid-e7e6f1ff-7561-4bd1-9060-331d215cc317","tag-displaytype-standard-article","tag-issyndicated-false","tag-locale-us","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-read_time-5","tag-shorttitle-why-this-artist-planted-a-small-forest-in-new-york","tag-sponsored-false","tag-subsection-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}