Over the course of the past year, the gallery’s graduate assistants collaborated with five local artists to design seed packet illustrations for five different varieties of flowers and herbs sourced from TrueLove Seeds. The five species chosen are Bee Balm, Bronze Fennel, Hopi Dye Sunflower, Feathery Plume Celosia, and Mexican Sunflower, which were picked for their beauty and ease of growing. Truelove Seeds is a farm-based seed company offering culturally important and open pollinated vegetable, herb, and flower seeds grown by more than 50 small-scale farmers committed to community food sovereignty, cultural preservation, and sustainable agriculture. 

This project came from the need to continue to engage with Temple Students and the Philadelphia art community despite limited ability to gather for events during the Coronavirus Pandemic. Inspired by the flourishing urban agriculture community in Philadelphia and the pandemic home gardening boom, Temple Contemporary hopes with this project to add some blooms to a city that will soon be filled with flowers. 

The Seed Packet designs were printed on the Temple Contemporary risograph and assembled and packed in-house. Completed seed packets will be distributed throughout the Temple Community and beyond this spring, available at Temple Main Campus, Tyler School of Art & Architecture, Temple Ambler, and several local community gardens through our partnership with the Temple Office of Sustainability. 

Participating Artists: Henry Bermudez, Soumya Dhulekar, Claes Gabriel, Justine Kelley, and Kay Seohyung Lee.

Did you grow seeds from this project? We want to see! Please tag any online content #TCSEEDS