Flowers For Incarcerated Mothers is an art and garden project made in collaboration with artist jackie sumell and over two dozen mothers who are incarcerated—many of whom are serving life-sentences. In this installation, flowers are grown as part of the movement for abolition, and the gardens, as sumell puts it, help people “imagine a landscape without prisons.” Flowers For Incarcerated Mothers aims to bring visibility and support to the nearly 150,000 incarcerated mothers in the United States.

The Davenport Jail is a two-room county jailhouse built in 1914 in Davenport, California. Now a museum, administered by the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, the Davenport Jail provides regional context for the larger tragedy of incarceration evocatively layered onto its walls.

Learn more about the Davenport Jail, the exhibition, and the artists here on the Institute of the Arts and Sciences website.

ADMISSION

• ​Free and open to the public.
• Attend in person.
• Hours of operation:
  • Fri, Sept 16—Sun, Sept 18, 2022, from noon–3:00 p.m. 
  • Fri, Sept 23—Sun, Sept 25, 2022, from noon–3:00 p.m. 
  • Sat, Oct 1, 2022—Sat, June 10, 2023, open every Saturday from noon–3:00 p.m. 
    (excluding holidays)

ABOUT THE SERIES
Flowers For Incarcerated Mothers is organized by Rachel Nelson and Gina Dent in partnership with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History as part of “Visualizing Abolition,” a public scholarship initiative at UC Santa Cruz designed to shift the social attachment to prisons through art and education. Funding for “Visualizing Abolition” is provided by the Mellon Foundation. See visualizingabolition.ucsc.edu for more information.

image credit: Image courtesy of jackie sumell's Solitary Garden "Flowers for Incarcerated Mothers" project.