One Work: Rosalie Smith’s “My Mother’s Last Garden”

I write this in spring; dead flowers bloom at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. They belong to Rosalie Smith’s My Mother’s Last Garden (2019), a palliative repurposing of the bouquets the artist’s mother received following her diagnosis with terminal cancer, up until her death.
The piece is an aberration in context, on view as part of the exhibition “Make America What America Must Become,” in which Southern artists pan our capitalist, carceral, colonial h