Garden Installation In Doylestown Retraces Prison's "Short Line"

DOYLESTOWN, PA — A living garden installation at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown by New Orleans multidisciplinary artist Jackie Sumell - on view from May 30 through the fall of 2026 - explores the building site’s history as the Bucks County Jail.

Titled "The Short Line," the garden bed installation traces the approximate footprint of three original cells from the Bucks County Jail’s “short line,” a corridor that once extended from either side of the jail’s central guardhouse. The guardhouse is now repurposed as a gallery for the Michener’s modern and contemporary art collection. "The Short Line" garden is located just outside the museum’s main entrance, freely accessible to the public.

"The Short Line" was planted this week, with a community gathering and an artist meet-and-greet with Sumell on Friday, May 30. For more than a year, "The Short Line" will be a feature of the museum’s outdoor sculpture garden, which bridges the Michener and the Doylestown branch of the Bucks County Free Library, near the remnants of the old stone wall of the former Bucks County Jail.

According to information provided by the museum, Sumell's artistic practice of two decades merges social sculpture, radical gardening, and abolitionist advocacy. The internationally-recognized artist is known for her Solitary Gardens, garden bed projects that are the same size as a solitary confinement cell and planted in correspondence with prisoners serving their sentences in isolation. In "The Short Line," Sumell responds to the land of the jail site itself, treating it both as a witness and wound to shape a new, site-responsive approach to renewal.

Central to "The Short Line" is phytoremediation — the use of plants like clover, sunflower, and willow, with the natural ability to absorb and detoxify contaminants in the soil. These plants both literally and symbolically undertake the slow, necessary labor of restoration near where incarcerated persons once undertook gardening at the Bucks County Jail. From the 1900s to the 1950s, incarcerated people tended a multi-acre vegetable garden right outside the jail walls for food during the growing and harvest seasons, with the surplus canned for the winter.

At the installation’s close in the fall of next year, the perennial plants grown within each former cell bed will be potted and gifted to community members. The collective act of giving is a gesture that affirms community connection to the transformation of the Michener’s historical building and grounds.

“The transformation of this gloomy and forbidding old jail into a sunny, constructive, and forward-looking art museum has been a modern miracle,” said Doylestown Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Museum namesake James A. Michener in 1992. “It’s the kind of bold gesture that a community ought to take now and then, a safe investment in the future of our society.”

The first courthouse and jail in Doylestown was built at the corner of Main Street and Court Street in 1813, when the town became the new seat of Bucks County. The construction of an expanded Bucks County Jail on Pine Street, designed by architect Addison Hutton and modeled after Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, was completed in 1884. The Bucks County Jail closed in 1985 for overcrowded and inhumane conditions, and in 1988, it became the site of Michener Art Museum. New museum facilities were integrated with the remaining prison structures, including the former warden’s house, sally port, guardhouse, and jail walls.

"The Short Line" is the culminating installation of a multi-year initiative, Behind These Walls: Reckoning with Incarceration, that investigates the Michener Art Museum site’s history as the Bucks County Jail through new interpretation of its building and grounds. "Behind These Walls: Reckoning with Incarceration" has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

New interpretation of the Michener’s history as a county jail was developed with a community advisory committee. Advisors on the committee included a diverse selection of people, with formerly incarcerated individuals, artists, mental health advocates, museum professionals, students, community elders, members of the local faith community, former corrections officers, local government employees, and victims of crime all taking part. The committee recommended interpreting Museum history through a lens that acknowledges the full breadth of the past without diminishing the individual dignity of those who were once here.

“There’s a great sense of neighborhood pride in the history of transforming a former jail into a space for art,” said Joshua Lessard, the museum’s director of exhibitions. “As an artwork about healing, 'The Short Line' invites us to imagine how justice might look if we continued that transformation into something even better.”

Related Exhibition Programming

• A Garden Gathering at The Short Line: Friday, May 30 from 2–4 p.m. Free admission, no registration required. Just outside Michener Art Museum’s main entrance, "The Short Line" invites visitors to walk with intention through a transformative garden space created by artist and abolitionist Jackie Sumell. Explore the installation at an opening celebration to meet the artist behind the exhibition. Light refreshments will be provided. This event will be held rain or shine.

About the Artist

Jackie Sumell is a New Orleans-based multidisciplinary artist and abolitionist. For over two decades, she has worked in close collaboration with incarcerated individuals — including Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King of Angola 3 — building projects that expose the violence of the prison system while cultivating visions for a world beyond it. Her work is a constant practice of gratitude for their tutelage, patience, and love.

Her practice merges social sculpture, radical gardening, and abolitionist imagination. Her work, including her Solitary Gardens and Abolitionist’s Apothecary, goes beyond traditional art boundaries,
challenging viewers to confront the realities of the prison industrial complex while envisioning a future without incarceration.

She is a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Soros Justice Fellowship, Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship, A Blade of Grass Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.