Rooted: Murals and Memory (2026 Flower Show Installation)
Mural Arts Philadelphia is pleased to present another exciting installation at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s highly anticipated annual Flower Show. Rooted: Murals and Memory features new works by four Philadelphia-based artists that explore the connections between art, horticulture, memory, and community.
Four original murals created by Eustace Mamba, Matthew Raghunauth, Miranda Lopez, and Richie Wilde Lopez demonstrate how the creative acts of gardening and mural-making overlap, preserving our personal and communal histories while nourishing our hearts, souls, and collective futures. Project curator Conrad Benner and the artists have taken inspiration from this year’s Flower Show theme, “Rooted: Origins of American Gardening,” celebrating the personal stories, cultural traditions, and horticultural inspiration that connect us to plants and each other, and which shape how we garden today.
The 2026 PHS Flower Show is on view from February 28 through March 8 at the Philadelphia Convention Center. Tickets can be purchased directly through the PHS Flower Show website.
Read more about the artists below and hear from them directly in exclusive podcast interviews with project curator Conrad Benner.
MORE ABOUT THE 2026 FLOWER SHOW ARTISTS:
Eustace Mamba
Life Is a Coloring Book: Past, Present, Future
Mamba is an artist from Queens, NY whose practice spans painting, textiles, sculpture, photography, and sewn mixed media. His work has been presented, exhibited, and collected by institutions including the Woodmere Art Museum, WHYY (PBS), Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, and he holds an MFA and BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
About the Artwork: “My practice is shaped by my West Indian heritage and my upbringing in-between New York and Pennsylvania, where family, community, and environment were constant influences. Working across painting, design, and sewn mixed media, I create images that hold both personal memory and shared experience, using familiar forms to explore connection, resilience, and care. At its core, my practice is about connection and transformation. I believe in art’s power to expand perspective, provoke thought, and invite dialogue.”
Website: eustvce.com
Follow on Instagram: @eustace.mamba
Matthew Raghunauth
Sugar, Sweat & Soil
Matthew Raghunauth is a queer, Philadelphia-based artist of Indo-Caribbean descent. Through abstract portraiture, he explores broader themes of nostalgia, memory, and loss. Photographs and fleeting-yet-charged moments with others continue to inspire his work; he preserves these significant moments by re-contextualizing them in pictorial diary entries. Raghunauth’s palette of honeyed, sunwashed hues emulates the ephemera of technicolor film and aging photo albums. His pieces take on a repetitive movement mirroring the beat of trance and techno music, and are ornamented with motifs seen in textiles and fashion.
About the Artwork: “This mural illustrates how the gardening practices of my parents and grandparents in Guyana afford me the life I have as an artist today. My understanding of Guyanese and Caribbean cultures began in the kitchen with my mother, through stories of helping her parents prepare and cook the harvest. The mural allows me to ask what it means to be Guyanese, what this means today, and what this means to me. The mural also acts within a field of prosthetic memory, rooting me to the daily rituals of my grandfather in the sugarcane fields, of my aunties picking karela, and of my father climbing persimmon trees, all in Guyana. This mural honors their experiences, affirming the value of knowledge cradled in memory, even when distant or faint.”
Website: raghunauth.myportfolio.com
Follow on Instagram: @rag.knot
Miranda Lopez
Supper’s Holdup: Of Olive, Wheat, and Flax
Miranda Lopez is a self-taught textile artist with over six years of experience creating 2D textile works on wooden surfaces that explore sacred narratives, storytelling, and emotional expression. Rooted in hands-on craftsmanship, her practice blends traditional fiber techniques with sculptural elements, using thread and material as a language for meaning. Lopez is the founder of Hilo Fiber Bar, where she fosters inclusive, hands-on learning experiences that celebrate community, process, and creative transformation. Through her work, Lopez challenges conventional views of textiles, positioning them at the intersection of fine art, tradition, and personal connection. Her work challenges conventional views of textiles, positioning them at the intersection of fine art, history, and personal connection—where each knot and fiber becomes a witness to transformation.
About the Artwork: “The three women exist in the shared pause before a Sunday evening meal, a moment familiar to many—coming home to a grandmother’s house, where food, light, and voices gather a family together. The flax woman is blue not as symbolism, but as biology—flax in its pre-bloom state—representing anticipation and preparation. She is on the phone, calling others home. The wheat woman sits, holding harvested grain, her labor already given. The olive woman stands near a lamp, shaped like a tree, keeping the light on. Together, they embody the domestic choreography through which gardening knowledge, foodways, and care have been passed down across generations. In this way, olive, wheat, and flax become more than plants—they become memory, belonging, and the origins of American gardening as lived experience.”
Website: hilofiberbar.com
Follow on Instagram: @mirandag.lopez / @hilofiberbar
Richie Wilde Lopez
Shared Soil, Many Roots
Richie Wilde Lopez is a queer Puerto Rican textile artist based in Philadelphia. His practice is rooted in traditional weaving and embroidery techniques, shaped by the knowledge and generosity shared with him by many women in the craft. He understands textiles as storytellers, fibers that hold memory, whether intentionally woven or quietly gathered over time. Drawn to the fragile, human lifespan of cloth, his work reflects on impermanence, resilience, and care. Unlike stone or metal, textiles fray, wear down, and decay, mirroring the vulnerability of bodies, identities, and histories. Through layered, tactile forms, his work explores Latinidad, queerness, and belonging, honoring imperfection as a site of strength and preserving what might otherwise be worn away by time.
About the Artwork: “My mural for the 2026 Philadelphia Flower Show explores the gardens we carry with us, in memory, culture, and practice. Drawing on my Puerto Rican heritage and diasporic experience in the U.S., I create immersive textile works that honor the plants, practices, and stories passed through generations. Using weaving, embroidery, and hand-dyed fibers, the work layers textures, colors, and forms to evoke gardens both remembered and reimagined, blending flora from my ancestral home with the environments of new lands. The mural reflects on how queerness, Latinidad, and community intersect with nature, shaping the ways we cultivate spaces of care, resilience, and growth. The techniques themselves are symbolic: individual threads are fragile alone, but once woven and stitched together they create strength, a reflection of community as collective power. Through textiles, I hope to translate the intangible, the small acts of tending, sharing, and sustaining, into material form. In reinterpreting the traditional American garden, the work asserts the essential presence of Latinx and queer experiences in shaping what it means to be American, celebrating the histories, contributions, and creativity that are vital to our collective identity today.”
Website: duendetextiles.com
Follow on Instagram: @Duende.Textiles
ABOUT THE CURATOR:
Conrad Benner is the founder of Streets Dept, a multi-platform showcase of Philadelphia art and public space. A Fishtown, Philadelphia born-and-raised photographer/videographer, curator (Streets Dept Walls and Mural Arts Philadelphia), and podcaster (WHYY’s Art Outside), Conrad’s award-winning work explores the art of our public space and the artists who create it. Central to Conrad’s curatorial work with Mural Arts are his efforts to increase civic engagement through the act of voting (To the Polls), as well as to create more pipelines for new artists to create their first murals (Front Street Walls and Flower Show projects). “At the heart of Conrad Benner’s work is a love for a city that he believes is particularly suited to a thriving street arts community.” —Joshua Needelman, New York Times.
Website: streetsdept.com
Follow on Instagram: @streetsdeptwalls
