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.