The teddy bear is 25 feet tall and functions as a slide. It sits in a garden that Precious Okoyomon has planted in the courtyard of MoMA PS1, a living forest designed to thrive through two New York summers. The installation, titled Among the Flowers I Learned to Love: A Garden of Earthly Delights, opens 31 July and will remain on view through summer 2028. It is the first work commissioned under PS1's new Courtyard Commission series.
Okoyomon's practice has always operated between categories. The artist, who is also a poet and a musician, makes sculptures from live plants, soil, and stuffed animals that hover between cute and unsettling. Previous installations have included invasive kudzu vines overtaking gallery walls and plush creatures that seem to decompose in real time. The PS1 commission scales that sensibility to a public outdoor space that sees heavy foot traffic during summer programming.
The two-year duration is unusual for a contemporary art commission. Most outdoor installations at major museums run three to six months before rotating to the next artist. PS1's decision to lock in a single vision for 24 months suggests confidence in both Okoyomon's drawing power and the garden's ability to evolve across seasons. The press materials describe the work as including sound installations alongside the botanical and sculptural elements, though specific details remain sparse.
Okoyomon's institutional profile has accelerated rapidly. The artist showed at the 2022 Venice Biennale, held a solo exhibition at the Luma Foundation in Arles, and has been collected by the Tate and the Whitney. The PS1 commission extends that trajectory into a different register: not a white-cube gallery but an outdoor courtyard where visitors might arrive for a summer party and find themselves inside a horticultural artwork.
The garden will change as the seasons turn. Plants will grow, bloom, wither, and return. The teddy bear slide will weather. By summer 2028, the installation will look different than it does at opening, a transformation that Okoyomon's practice has always embraced. The artist makes work about decay and renewal, about the uneasy coexistence of the natural and the artificial. The courtyard commission gives that work room to breathe, and 24 months to demonstrate that a living ecosystem commands public attention in ways a static sculpture never could.