Flowers For Sick People is a multimedia art and health project by me, Tucker Nichols. New elements of the project are added regularly.
Sickness can be a deeply isolating experience for everyone involved. Like many people, I’ve lived with illness for years. But there’s something about flowers—even if they are garish or they make you sneeze or they are hardly noticed—that can occasionally poke a hole in the wall of isolation that separates sick people from their loved ones. Sometimes flowers inadvertently express something else altogether, or are completely ignored. Flowers for Sick People is my way of looking at illness while trying to understand how humans struggle to connect in difficult times.
Please share this project with anyone you know who might find it helpful.
Current FSP projects on this website:
Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say
A new book from Chronicle
Flowers in the Dark:
Notes from the Infusion Center
Free digital book with text and art by Tucker Nichols
Hospital Commissions
Recently completed commissions at the children’s infusion center at UCSF Hospital at Mission Bay, Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, and the waiting room at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University.
Send Flowers
If you’d like me to mail flowers to a loved one who’s sick, you can request a free original flower painting.
I also post new flower paintings regularly on FB and Instagram.
To support this project, please consider a donation or take a look at available artwork for sale.
Thanks for visiting,
Tucker
Commission for the waiting room at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University
Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis at SFMOMA
A selection of 16 paintings from the Flowers for Sick People project recently on view at SFMOMA.
Tucker Nichols is an artist based in Northern California. His work has been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, the Denver Art Museum, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. A selection of 16 paintings from Flowers For Sick People was recently on view at SFMOMA.
His drawings have been published in McSweeney's, The Thing Quarterly, The New Yorker and the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. He is co-author of the books Crabtree (with Jon Nichols) and This Bridge Will Not Be Gray (with Dave Eggers).
You can see more at www.tuckernichols.com
SFMOMA: Flowers for Sick People
Tucker Nichols
Flowers for you, 2021
Four screenprints on heavy card
Commissioned by SFMOMA and the San Francisco Public Library
Reserve yours HERE
Flowers for you is an edition of four screenprints being distributed for free via the San Francisco Public Library system. Anyone with a library card can reserve a print here and pick it up from your local branch. Like library books, no one owns these prints. You can keep yours as long as you want, with the understanding that at some point, you'll pass it along to someone else who could use some flowers.