Bringing Paint Brushes to the Flower Show

For the 2024 Flower Show, Mural Arts Philadelphia has worked with three emerging Philly-area women muralists to create murals around the power of the collective!

Remember To Water is a new mural project featuring three original 12’ x 8’ murals from three local women artists: Tai Corrienté, Melissa Rothman, and Natalie Flor Negrón in honor of Women’s History Month. The project was curated by Conrad Benner and created with financial support from the Fleischner Public Art Fund and a prep workspace provided by Bok. You can see the murals March 2-10 at the Flower Show (tickets available here.)

The theme of this year’s Flower Show is ‘Untied by Flowers.’ Inspired by that idea, I thought about the power of people in flowering Philly’s arts scene. We’re titling our collective of murals Remember To Water. Our project reflects on the transformative potential of unity in an individualist culture. What gardens might blossom with the proper resources? What future can we sow together today?

An estimated 250,000 people visit the Flower Show each year. When you enter and move around the grand exhibition space at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, you notice a bouquet of beautiful floral scents. It’s more flowers in one place than I think I’ve ever seen. The flowers are arranged in any number of different creative ways, including many as part of larger sculptural structures, some designed to create mini-mazes that you can move through, and there’s even a bunch floating from the ceiling when you first walk in. It’s a lovely, enlivening space to find yourself in for an afternoon, to say the very least.

We started moving our murals into the Convention Center on Wednesday morning. Our artists then only had two days to complete their new artworks, which they started painting at a prep site at Bok. For these final installation days, we were joined by two assisting artists, Emily White, and Michele Scott, whose help was necessary to get the job done on time.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not to our Mural Arts fans, our project is the only one of over a hundred exhibitions at the Flower Show that doesn’t use any real flowers. Yet, we’re welcomed every year.

As we were finishing the murals, not a second would pass without a participating florist, an exhibition staff member, or the custodial crew stopping by to watch our artists work. They ask questions about how murals are made, their eyes move around the artwork to find flowers they recognize, and they almost always take a photo to remember it. In its simplest form, this is one reason art is a great unifier. And why, despite the fact that we show up with paint brushes and not watering cans, our Mural Arts projects have become an invaluable part of the festivities. I can’t help but to correlate this to the greater work of Mural Arts.

As we celebrate our 40th anniversary year, we’ll continue to acknowledge all the ways Mural Arts shows up in Philly. From our Art Education, Restorative Justice, and Porch Light services to the root of our organization’s work in creating beauty and public artwork in every neighborhood of Philadelphia with members of the community and hundreds of local artists.

In curating Remember To Water, we worked with three incredible local artists–and for all of them, this was a landmark project in their mural-making careers! This was Melissa Rothman’s first mural ever created; it was the largest mural Tai Corrienté has painted to date; and for Natalie Flor Negrón, it’s the first time she’s worked with Mural Arts in several years.

“It’s fun, and I love how physical it is,” Melissa Rothman explained what it’s like painting her first mural. “It is challenging, but nothing I can’t handle. I’ve just been treating it like a giant painting, and it’s worked out so far. My mural is looking forward to the spring, because winter is hard on us all. I absolutely love spring! I have a vegetable garden–actually, once my mural is done, I’m going to start planting seeds.”

“I thought Tiger Lilies would be the boldest and most eye-catching flower to paint,” Natalie Flor Negrón helped me understand her thought process to grab people’s attention at the busy Flower Show. “It gave me the opportunity to add neon pops to it because the flowers were really bright already. And it makes it look like it’s glowing in the sun.”

“I was inspired by a quote I wrote based on the theme,” Tai Corrienté told me. “‘Remember to water yourself down to the root, for one day you will bear the fruit of a new generation.’ I just started thinking about painting a motherly figure that is giving life to a younger girl. And you can see that she’s coming into her own; she’s growing with the help of being nourished by that mother.”

As the crowds gather to enjoy the 2024 Flower Show in all its floral wonderment, there stands a triangle of walls right in the middle of it all that feature three new murals by three local muralists inviting visitors to stop, reflect, and reimagine what’s around them.