In front of a brick wall in Queens, a narrow path sinks into the density of a garden. Only part of the giant bear’s rounded back remains visible beyond the leaves. Precious Okoyomon’s Among the Flowers I Learned to Love: A Garden of Decreation is not a sculpture decorated with planting. It brings weeds, flowers, sedges, vines and pollinating life into one courtyard, placing change—from summer into autumn and onward to 2028—inside the work itself.
A garden that refuses two sides
MoMA PS1 describes a landscape in which things usually placed on opposite sides grow together: wild and cultivated, annual and perennial, native and invasive. The point is not to erase those distinctions, but to keep watching what happens when they share one site. Instead of placing each kind in an orderly bed, the garden allows height, overlapping leaves, decline and return to occupy the same field of vision.
The planting was developed with the specialist nursery issima. Official materials name grasses, flowers, weeds, sedges and vines, but do not make a finished species list the centre of the work. The garden is living material, not an opening-day arrangement to preserve. A branch lengthens into the line of sight, one flower ends, and another leaf moves forward. Those shifts create a time that belongs neither only to sculpture nor only to horticulture.
The photograph here records one point in the installation during 2026; it is not a promise of how the garden looks now. The whole artwork is withheld. Path, rock and layers of foliage arrive first. The bear has retreated far enough into the scene that it must be found, allowing the garden to determine the order in which the work is seen.
Enter the bear, then return to the leaves
At the centre of the garden stands The Pleasure Principle, a teddy-bear sculpture about twenty-five feet long. Visitors climb steps and enter from the rear, hear Okoyomon reading their poetry inside, then leave through a slide at the mouth. A wild animal softened by culture into a toy and companion has been enlarged until it becomes a small piece of architecture that a body can cross.
Sound composed by Oliver Leith also moves through the garden. Instrumentation inspired by flowers and the artist’s recorded voice have no fixed visual form among the planting. Entering the bear may be the strongest single action, yet the exit returns a visitor to leaf, stone and path. The large sculpture becomes less a final destination than a device that turns the body and asks the garden to be seen again.
Following the path in the photograph, a foreground rock, low grasses, slender trunks and hanging branches mark separate layers of depth. The bear’s earthen colour appears only through breaks in green. Even before reading a title or an artist’s name, the relation is legible: something immense is being partially covered by growth. The plants do not explain the sculpture; they adjust its outline day by day.
Completion is not waiting in 2028
The commission opened on July 31, 2026 and remains on view through 2028. Two years do not mean that a final, perfected form waits at the end. The abundance of the first summer, the first autumn, winter density and later emergence are each the work in the present tense. Rather than expecting the scene preserved in an opening photograph, it makes more sense to read the height and intervals of the day one arrives.
Okoyomon takes Simone Weil’s idea of “decreation”—the world continually made and unmade—as one point of departure. MoMA PS1 extends that thought toward a city garden that mutates and adapts amid climatic unpredictability. Adaptation here is not a promise that everything will remain orderly or thrive. Growth, weakness and the taking of new space can occupy the same unfinished condition.
Admission to MoMA PS1 is free, and the commission is currently listed through 2028; opening days should be confirmed before a visit. The most reliable expectation, however, is that the garden will not be identical next time. Once the bear is found, look back at the leaves that hid it and the path that carried the eye. Refusing completion is not a defect in this work. It is the method that plants have brought into it.