Let’s Get Free: Ecologies of Care, Love & Abolition
May 1 - June 14, 2026
Photo of Mama’s Day Bail Out by Mark Strandquist. Illustrations by Katie Kaplan.
Let’s Get Free: Ecologies of Care, Love & Abolition is an exhibition celebrating ten years of the People’s Paper Co-op (PPC).
From 2014 - 2024 the People’s Paper Co-op (PPC) 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 prison uniforms, collaborative films, a decomposing prison 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.
PUBLIC PROGRAMMING
Let’s Get Free: Ecologies of Care, Love & Abolition features a robust series of workshops, events, and community conversations. All events are free (with donations accepted) but some require registration. Come through and let’s build a better world!
Friday, May 1, 2026, 5-9PM
Opening Reception and Book Launch
A limited number of the People’s Paper Co-op new book will be available for purchase with 100% of sales going to community bail funds. The exhibition will also include a pop-up abolitionist shop full of posters, zines, prints, medicine from the Prisoner’s Apothecary, and more.
Saturday, May 9th, 2026, 2-4pm
All the Flowers For Our Moms
A bouquet and cardmaking workshop for moms on both sides of the walls
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!
Registration not necessary, but encouraged. Join us at the beginning for a brief presentation about the exhibition and the amazing work of the People’s Flower School before making a bouquet and card.
Please use this link to RSVP
Saturday, May 16, 2026, 10am-2pm
Sowing the Seeds of Resistance & Growing Abolition
Richmond Community Bail Fund is organizing a two-day symposium as part of the exhibition.
Day One of the symposium on May 16th will include two sessions. One session on Abolition 101 and a second session focused on community safety strategies including harm reduction, mutual aid, and peer support to expand our capacity for community care, rebuild our connective tissue, and build the internal and external healing and solidarity needed for collective liberation.
Please use this link to RSVP
Saturday, May 23, 2026, 10am-2pm
Cultivating Safety, Decriminalizing Communities
Day Two of the symposium on May 23rd will include two sessions. One session will focus on the increased criminalization of immigrant communities and the harmful impacts on community safety (i.e. increased surveillance, militarization of police, federal law enforcement, and building of DHS warehouse facilities). The second session will be a creative art build session.
We are so grateful to the Richmond Community Bail Fund for organizing this powerful community conversation. Learn about and support their work here: https://rvabailfund.org/
Please use this link to RSVP
ARTIST BIOS
The People’s Paper Co-op // Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist
The People’s Paper Co-op was started and co-led by Richmond, VA based artists Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist, who have spent over 15 years working together to create immersive exhibitions, interactive photo-based public art, collaborative films, and multimedia projects that have connected marginalized communities with hundreds of thousands of viewers.
Their work has been exhibited in museums, galleries, universities, and the National Mall, as well as through parades, church-basement legal clinics, and illegal wheatpaste installations. They have received multiple awards, fellowships, national residencies, and reached wide audiences through the NY Times, BBC, the Guardian, NPR, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, PBS, VICE, and many others.
Through fellowships from A Blade of Grass and Open Societies Foundation, they started and co-directed the People’s Paper Co-op (PPC) and The Reentry Think Tank in Philadelphia, PA. The PPC’s annual Free Our Mothers! Sisters! Queens! art campaign raised over $240,000 for the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund’s efforts to free Black mothers and caregivers for Mother’s Day.
Strandquist started and then co-led the national abolitionist arts organization Performing Statistics till it ended in 2024. In response to the Covid19 public health crisis, he founded Fill the Walls With Hope, Rage, Resources and Dreams, which installed thousands of posters on boarded up buildings across Philadelphia.
Most recently they’ve been organizing benefit concerts (raising over $24,000 for local mutual aid efforts) and exhibits at Studio Two Three, making zines about potatoes found at a warehouse job, and falling in love with the James River every chance they can.
jackie sumell
jackie sumell is a multidisciplinary artist and abolitionist inspired most by the lives of everyday people. Her work has been successfully anchored at the intersection of activism, education, mindfulness practices and art for nearly two decades, and it has been exhibited extensively throughout the world. She has been the recipient of multiple residencies and fellowships including, but not limited to, a SOURCE Fellowship, A Blade of Grass, Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship, a Soros Justice Fellowship, an Eyebeam Fellowship, a Headlands Residency and a Schloss Solitude Residency Fellowship. sumell’s collaboration with Herman Wallace (a prisoner-of-consciousness and member of the Angola 3) was the subject of the Emmy Award-Winning documentary Herman’s House. sumell’s work with Herman has positioned her at the forefront of the national campaign to end solitary confinement and seek humane alternatives to incarceration. Sumell is based in New Orleans, LA where she continues to work on Herman’s House, Solitary Gardens, The Prisoner’s Apothecary, and several other community-generated, advocacy-based projects.
Planting Justice
In 2020, Kate DeCiccio, Hiroyo Kaneko and Malaya Tuyay began collaborating with the staff at Planting Justice at their nursery in East Oakland, CA. Planting Justice employs people impacted by mass incarceration with the skills and resources to cultivate food sovereignty, economic justice, and community healing. Through weekly creative workshops, the project has focused on using art-making to deepen connections with the power of growing food in community and explore how plants embody principles of abolition.
The People’s Flower School
The People’s Flower School, founded by Becca Amos and Meredith Wheeler, facilitates Floral Therapy inside the Chesterfield County Jail. 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.
Dennis Williams II
Dennis Williams II, MA, MEd, PhD, is a Research Associate at the University of Virginia and an adjunct professor at Virginia State University, where he teaches art history and visual culture. His interdisciplinary research draws from Critical Theory, Black radical traditions, contemplative science, and abolitionist thought to examine oppression, relationality, and repair across educational and cultural landscapes. His writing has appeared in African American Review, Obsidian, Educational Policy, and the Richmond Racial Equity Essay Series. A native of Decatur, Georgia, born in Atlanta, he enjoys restoring his family’s historic home, reading, writing, and shooting pool.