Abolitionist Tea Party led by jackie sumell of Solitary Gardens

The Abolitionist’s Tea Party asks: How does the natural world endorse abolition as a strategy for liberation? If we accept abolition as a commitment to ending cycles of harm, we can begin to see all the ways the natural world informs the tenets of human abolition. Participants will learn how plants have played key roles in stories of resistance and share their experience and understanding of abolition. Each workshop will offer the opportunity to smell and taste teas grown and prepared in collaboration with currently incarcerated people through sumell’s Solitary Gardens project. 

Capacity limited to 20 participants.

is a multidisciplinary artist and abolitionist inspired most by the lives of everyday people. Her work has been successfully anchored at the intersection of activism, education, mindfulness practices and art for nearly two decades, and it has been exhibited extensively throughout the world. She has been the recipient of multiple residencies and fellowships including, but not limited to, a SOURCE Fellowship, A Blade of Grass, Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship, a Soros Justice Fellowship, an Eyebeam Fellowship, a Headlands Residency and a Schloss Solitude Residency Fellowship. sumell’s collaboration with Herman Wallace (a prisoner-of-consciousness and member of the Angola 3) was the subject of the Emmy Award-Winning documentary Herman’s House. sumell’s work with Herman has positioned her at the forefront of the national campaign to end solitary confinement and seek humane alternatives to incarceration. Sumell is based in New Orleans, LA where she continues to work on Herman’s House, Solitary Gardens, The Prisoner’s Apothecary, and several other community-generated, advocacy-based projects.

This program is presented by Let’s Get Free: Ecologies of Care, Love & Abolition, an exhibition by People’s Paper Co-op at, May 1 through June 14, 2026. The exhibition features a robust series of workshops, events, and community conversations.

From 2014 - 2024 the People’s Paper Co-op 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 artraised 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 Pr*son uniforms, collaborative films, a decomposing Pr*son 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.

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Host or Publisher 1708 Gallery Inc.