OKOYOMON'S MOMA PS1 BEAR LETS VISITORS CLIMB INSIDE

MoMA PS1's courtyard was a parking lot in the 1970s and a gravel forecourt after that. On July 31, 2026, in the museum's fiftieth anniversary year, Precious Okoyomon planted its first garden there, and the count is already outrunning the press kit. Hypebeast put the planting at about 1,500 perennials on opening day, while Whitewall's count has more than 2,000 plants and nearly fifty trees in the ground, and the piece stays through 2028.

The centerpiece is a 25 foot teddy bear named The Pleasure Principle, which visitors enter from the rear and leave through the mouth. Okoyomon's own line on the site is the whole thesis.

"There's never been a garden there, and it feels like there should," Okoyomon told Meka Boyle in Family Style on July 29, 2026.

A 1970s Parking Lot Gets Its First Garden at Fifty

Among the Flowers I Learned to Love: A Garden of Decreation is the inaugural work in the Courtyard Commission, a new biannual program at MoMA PS1 inviting artists to make site specific, large scale work for the outdoor courtyard. It is organized by Ruba Katrib, the museum's Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with major support from Bloomberg Philanthropies and further support from VIA Art Fund, The Monica and Douglas Taylor Foundation and The Falls Foundation.

Hyperallergic's Hrag Vartanian called the courtyard "famously barren" in his July 29, 2026 review, and the sponsor list explains how a two year garden got funded in a space that had never held one. The museum frames the work as a response to "the unpredictability of climate changes," and Family Style reported a rust coloured wildfire haze over New York the week before it opened.

Okoyomon calls it "my dream apocalypse garden."

The Pleasure Principle Is a Bear You Exit Through the Mouth

The Pleasure Principle is a 25 foot concrete teddy bear with a pink fiberglass interior, and it is Okoyomon's largest sculpture to date. Visitors climb a staircase built into its back, slide down a blood red chute through its body while a recording of Okoyomon laughing and reading a poem set to music plays inside, and come out of its mouth.

Okoyomon ties the bear to Leo Bersani's 1987 essay "Is the Rectum a Grave?" and gave Vartanian the one line answer: "The rectum isn't a grave, it's just a portal." The bear, Okoyomon told Family Style, exists "to protect my forest," and they are already imagining a version twice the size.

It follows another 2026 sculpture built to be moved through rather than looked at, Daniel Arsham's two hollow heads with staircases inside at City of Dreams Macau, which opened in April. Arsham's heads are open 24 hours at a casino entrance. Okoyomon's bear is free in a museum courtyard in Long Island City, with a slide.

Two Counts, 1,500 Perennials and Then More Than 2,000 Plants

Erin Ikeuchi's Hypebeast report on July 31, 2026 counted about 1,500 perennials and plants. Victoria Pokovba's Whitewall piece from the same day wrote that the installation "already contains more than 2,000 plants and nearly fifty trees," and both were describing a garden Okoyomon calls an orchestra, where "the pink will fade as soon as the white pops up."

The planting mixes native and invasive species on purpose, annuals with perennials, cultivated growth with wild. Milkweed is in for the butterflies, yarrow and mullein for their medicinal use, poppies and Queen Anne's lace grown from seed, river birch among the trees, passion flower and morning glory already climbing the walls.

Ceramic tiles across the site carry fragments from Okoyomon's book But Did You Die?, published by Serpentine and Wonder Press, and the tiles first appeared in an earlier Okoyomon garden in Aspen. Birdsong, trains passing beneath the museum and a fifteen minute composition by Oliver Leith make up the score.

Preston Linck and Issima Have Been on the Team Since Aspen in 2021

The plants came from Issima, a nursery in Rhode Island, and the layout from Colorado landscape architect Preston Linck, a team Okoyomon first assembled for a 2021 living rooftop commission at the Aspen Art Museum. Art Basel's reporting has Okoyomon and Linck working together since on the 2022 Venice Biennale and the 2025 São Paulo Biennial before this one.

The build in Queens ran with Alpine Construction and used stone from regional quarries, and Whitewall reported the planning took nearly two years. Okoyomon keeps a master plant document of around 30,000 species, has lived in New York for almost ten years, and tends a meadow with a fairy circle on Mendes Wood DM's Germantown property upstate.

The childhood version was less gentle. Okoyomon's job in their grandmother's garden at a ranch house in Houston was picking stinging nettle, which they now call "a garden of discomfort."

Through 2028, Longer Than Halsey's Park in South Central

The two year run lands in a year when outdoor art keeps getting multi year windows. Lauren Halsey's sister dreamer sculpture park in South Central Los Angeles opened March 14, 2026 and runs through September 2027. Okoyomon's garden outlasts it.

The museum marked the opening on September 12, 2026 with a free open house that paired the garden with Homeroom's Artists Against the Bomb, where every visitor leaves with a copy of Keith Haring's 1982 Nuclear Disarmament poster, plus a mini terrarium workshop, a peace sign design session and a Garden Get Down with DJ sets from 4 to 6 pm.

A garden built on relinquishment, Simone Weil's decreation, is the one piece here that will look different every month until 2028. By the time it closes, the courtyard will have carried two summers, two winters and a 25 foot bear on ground that held cars in the 1970s.