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If your idea of a perfect summer day involves Andy Warhol, giant daisies, live folk music, Woodstock vibes and approximately 1 million flowers, the New York Botanical Garden has a very specific event for you.
Starting on Saturday, May 23, the Bronx institution will debut "Flower Power," a sprawling, garden-wide exhibition that turns the gardens into a colorful celebration of flowers as symbols of peace, love, creativity and environmental awareness. The exhibition runs through October 18 and takes over everything from the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory to outdoor lawns, gallery spaces and even artist-designed buses scattered across the grounds.
At the center of the exhibition is an art show that looks back to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s. Visitors will find paintings, photographs, posters, fashion and archival materials exploring how flowers became visual shorthand for everything from anti-war protests to environmental activism. Among the highlights are three works by pop art legend Andy Warhol, including his iconic Flowers series, alongside pieces by artists including Milton Glaser, Joe Brainard and Carlos Irizarry.
Outside, a 15-foot-wide peace sign planted with live flowers greets visitors near the entrance. Colorful buses inspired by the decorated vehicles that carried festivalgoers to Woodstock will pop up throughout the Garden and the Conservatory Lawn will feature massive hand-painted fabric canopies, while an interactive textile fence invites visitors to contribute to a collaborative artwork inspired by the original Woodstock Festival. Monumental rainbow-colored daisy sculptures by artist Amie Jacobsen will bloom inside the Conservatory.
The exhibition also touches on the era's fascination with spirituality and mindfulness. Water lilies and lotus flowers fill the Hardy Pool Courtyard, while a partnership with the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art's Mandala Lab explores themes of meditation, consciousness and Eastern philosophy that helped shape the counterculture movement.
And because no flower-power celebration would be complete without music, NYBG is hosting a series of after-hours Liquid Light Shows beginning May 30. The ticketed events pair live performances by bands including Ghost Funk Orchestra, Habibi, Evolfo and Woods with swirling psychedelic projections across the façade of the Mertz Library Building (a modern take on the liquid-light spectacles that accompanied acts like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead in the late 1960s).
Daytime programming will include folk concerts, drum circles, friendship bracelet workshops, sound baths, breathwork sessions and screenings of films including Woodstock, Hair and Summer of Soul.
“Flower Power unites world-class art with our living plant collections and our historic landmark buildings and landscape,” said Jennifer Bernstein, CEO and the William C. Steere senior president of the New York Botanical Garden. “It’s an opportunity for us to present a
cultural experience that can only happen at a botanical garden of this scale and scope, where art, history, and the natural world coexist.”
Basically, if someone turned a botanical garden, an art museum and a 1969 music festival into one giant summer experience, it would probably look a lot like this.
