A Living Sculpture Garden: Precious Okoyomon’s Vision of Decreation at MoMA PS1

The inaugural installation of MoMA PS1‘s new Courtyard Commission introduces Precious Okoyomon‘s Among the Flowers I Learned to Love: A Garden of Decreation, on view through 2028. The new biannual series invites artists to create large-scale site-specific works for the museum’s courtyard, transforming what was once a 1970s parking lot—and today a gravel-filled, concrete forecourt—into a living public space.

As the first environment visitors encounter before entering the museum, the courtyard takes on new significance alongside PS1’s recently announced free admission. Instead of a stark Brutalist threshold, Precious Okoyomon imagines it as an evolving ecosystem.

A Monument to Childhood

At the center of the installation rests The Pleasure Principle, a 25-foot-long concrete teddy bear.

Rather than emphasizing the ferocity of the wild animal that inspired it, Precious Okoyomon transforms the bear into something irresistibly familiar—a childhood toy with heart-shaped paw pads, rosy cheeks, rounded ears, and a pink heart-shaped nose. Visitors climb a staircase built into its rear before sliding through its body, guided by a constellation of glowing lights while Okoyomon’s poetry fills the interior. They emerge through the bear’s mouth, completing a playful yet deeply symbolic passage.

The sculpture rewards a full 360-degree experience. Surrounding it is an ever-changing landscape of grasses, flowers, sedges, vines, pollinators, and wild growth sourced from issima in Rhode Island. Birds, rustling leaves, passing trains beneath the museum, and a fifteen-minute sound composition by Oliver Leith become part of the installation’s living score.

Placed inside PS1’s concrete courtyard, the concrete bear feels quietly tongue-in-cheek. Yet beneath its playful exterior lies a meditation on survival. Over the next two years it will weather scorching summers, flooding rains, smoke, snowstorms, hurricanes, and everything else New York City throws its way, slowly developing a patina that allows it to merge with the architecture surrounding it.

Precious Okoyomon on Poetry as Pollination

Embedded throughout the landscape are ceramic tiles inscribed with fragments from Okoyomon’s book But Did You Die?, published by Serpentine and Wonder Press.

The ceramic tiles appeared in an earlier garden created in Aspen before finding new life here. “They’re fragments of the poems that leak into everything,” the artist explains.

Scattered among the grasses and stones, visitors encounter lines like “keep falling into calculated fading,” “put your hand on your hips let that backbone dip,” “in the belly of the sun,” and “construct an obstruction already weaponing within.” They read like fleeting thoughts or half-remembered dreams, surfacing unexpectedly as the garden slowly reveals itself.

Instead of functioning as captions, the poems drift through the landscape like seeds themselves—small acts of pollination connecting one garden to another, allowing language to grow alongside flowers, trees, and wild grasses.

Psychology, Decreation, and the Inner Child

Working between poetry and visual art, Okoyomon draws inspiration from psychoanalytic writers Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, whose Intimacies informs the psychological undercurrents of the installation.

Reflecting on Bersani’s famous provocation asking whether “the rectum is the grave,” Precious Okoyomon proposes instead that “the rectum isn’t the grave but the portal into possibility.”

The journey through the sculpture becomes a physical manifestation of that idea.

“You start in the butt, slide down through, you’re digested, and you end up in the head with the poetry and the lights,” the artist says. The experience becomes less playground than psychological ritual—a portal that returns adults to a creative state of possibility, decreation, and imagination.

A Garden That Refuses Control

Like all forests, this one is designed to remain unfinished. “The joy about a forest is that it’s always changing, everything is always in bloom and different cycles and that’s how I’ve designed the garden,” Okoyomon says.

Still in its infancy, the installation already contains more than 2,000 plants and nearly fifty trees. Yet its final form remains unknowable. Birds, bees, wind, weather, and self-seeding plants will continue shaping the landscape long after the artist leaves. “You can’t control where a seed blows.”

This marks Okoyomon’s seventh garden. “I see it as an orchestra,” they say. “Everything is going to bloom in different successions and die. I’m excited to see all the bulbs that come up after winter.”

Passionflower, clematis, jasmine, morning glory, corkscrew hazel, cedar, hazelnut, and specially cultivated varieties of Queen Anne’s Lace all contribute to an ecosystem built around continual transformation.

Allowing self-seeding and natural pollination is, in their words, “the magic of not controlling what is just going to end up being like wild.”

Building an Ecosystem

The project has been nearly two years in the making.

Working alongside Alpine Construction and longtime collaborator and landscape architect Preston Link, Okoyomon sourced stone from regional quarries while designing a landscape capable of surviving New York’s increasingly unpredictable climate. Installation itself unfolded through flash floods, smoke, extreme heat, and heavy rain—conditions that ultimately prepared the garden for the years ahead.

Concrete was chosen not only for its durability but because time will continue reshaping it. As seasons pass, the sculpture will weather, soften, and gradually become less pristine, blending ever more seamlessly into the surrounding architecture.

As Ruba Katrib, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, notes: “An ever-evolving site of recreation and rest, this installation will offer a welcoming and immersive green space for both museum visitors and the Long Island City community over the next two years.”

Wonder as Resistance

Perhaps the installation’s greatest achievement is how completely it transforms one of New York’s most Brutalist courtyards into something unexpectedly tender.

A giant bear rests among flowers and trees while poetry, birdsong, wind, and music replace the city’s usual soundtrack. For a moment, the surrounding skyline fades into the background.

The sculpture humanizes the bear, turning an animal associated with danger into the plush companion of childhood memory. Yet beneath that softness lies something more profound. Among the Flowers I Learned to Love: A Garden of Decreation invites visitors to rediscover imagination not as nostalgia, but as a way of understanding adulthood itself. Okoyomon’s poetry, scattered throughout the landscape and whispered inside the sculpture, reminds us that wonder and wisdom are not opposites. Like the garden itself, they grow together.