The Short Line: Living Garden

The Short Line is a living garden installation by artist jackie sumell, located just outside the Michener Art Museum’s main entrance and freely accessible to the public. Visitors are invited to move through this space with intention—to reflect on the carceral histories rooted in the land, and to imagine what becomes possible when we remember, reimagine, and replant. The garden 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—now repurposed as a gallery for the museum’s modern and contemporary art collection. Where there were once bars and bricks, there is now soil, solidarity, and shared history. This act of transformation insists that we cannot heal what we refuse to confront. At the heart of The Short Line is phytoremediation—the use of plants like clover, sunflower, and willow, to naturally cleanse soil of toxins and restore balance. These plants perform the kind of quiet, generative work our society too often overlooks: the slow, necessary labor of restoration. The Short Line challenges us to consider what is buried beneath our feet—and what it means to grow something new in the footprint of what once was. If we ignore the past, we risk repeating it. But if we tend to it—like soil—we may begin to collectively repair. The Short Line is part of Behind These Walls: Reckoning with Incarceration , a multi-year initiative at the Michener that confronts the site’s former life as a county jail. Through new interpretation, community dialogue, and installations like sumell’s, the project reclaims the museum’s architecture and gardens as spaces for reckoning, healing, and radical reimagination.

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