Art in Bloom DC

The Dream That Took a Decade to Bloom: How Art in Bloom Came to Washington

Some dreams arrive all at once.

Others take years to introduce themselves.

Mine began during my first year working as a florist, when I was determined to learn everything I possibly could about my profession. I read constantly, studied the work of designers I admired, and searched for ideas that were changing the way people thought about flowers.

That was when I discovered Bouquets to Art at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and Art in Bloom at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

I was captivated.

The concept was elegantly simple: floral designers are invited into a museum and asked to create botanical interpretations of works from its collection. For a few brief days, paintings, sculptures, furniture, decorative arts, and historic objects are joined by living works of art made from flowers.

But the simplicity of the concept disguises what actually happens.

Flowers change the way people look at art.

Visitors slow down. They notice a color in a painting they might otherwise have overlooked. They compare texture, movement, symbolism, and composition. Complete strangers begin discussing interpretations with one another.

The florist isn't trying to copy the artwork. The arrangement is having a conversation with it.

Every designer is essentially being asked the same question:

If this work of art could bloom, what would it become?

There is something else I have always loved about the idea.

Museums are institutions devoted to permanence. Their collections are preserved so objects can survive for generations.

Flowers are exactly the opposite.

They bloom, reach their peak, and disappear.

For a few days during an Art in Bloom exhibition, permanence and impermanence stand side by side.

The more I learned about these exhibitions, the more obvious one question became:

Why didn't Washington, D.C., have one?

Our nation's capital has extraordinary museums, extraordinary collections, and an extraordinary community of floral designers. It seemed like the perfect city for Art in Bloom.

Apparently, I was the only person who thought so.

Years of No

I began pitching museums.

And pitching museums.

And pitching museums.

There were polite rejections, unanswered emails, changes in leadership that briefly gave me hope, revised proposals and, more often than anything else, silence.

Eventually I traveled to Boston to see Art in Bloom for myself.

It only made things worse.

I came home more convinced than ever that Washington deserved one.

For years I carried around a strange fear that the idea was simply too good for no one else to discover. Surely another florist would eventually think of it. Surely someone else would walk into the right museum, talk to the right person, and suddenly become the founder of Washington's Art in Bloom.

Then I read Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic.

Gilbert writes about ideas almost as though they are living things, traveling through the world looking for someone willing to bring them into existence. If one person ignores an idea long enough, perhaps it eventually knocks on someone else's door.

Whether you believe that literally isn't really the point.

I realized I could spend my energy worrying about someone else creating the thing I wanted to create.

Or I could make myself ready for the moment when the opportunity finally appeared.

So I kept going.

The Person Who Could See It

Eight years after I first discovered Art in Bloom, I had my own floral business and had spent years building relationships throughout Washington.

I had also learned something important.

Opportunities rarely arrive through cold emails.

They arrive through people.

One afternoon, my friend Joanie introduced me to Glenn Hennessey, who oversaw weddings and events at Anderson House, the extraordinary Beaux-Arts mansion on Massachusetts Avenue that is home to the Society of the Cincinnati.

We sat on the back porch drinking rosé and talking about the house, its history, and its events.

The meeting was nearly over.

I almost left without mentioning Art in Bloom.

Almost.

As we were wrapping up, I casually told Glenn about this idea I had been trying to bring to Washington for years.

I'll never forget his reaction.

You could almost see the thought forming.

Then he said something that changed the course of the next decade of my life:

"What if Anderson House is the perfect place to do it?"

For the first time in nearly a decade, someone else could see the dream.

Even better, Glenn already understood it. He had grown up in Minneapolis, home to the Minneapolis Institute of Art's long-standing Art in Bloom tradition.

I wasn't explaining why the concept mattered.

He already knew.

Together, we began developing a proposal for Anderson House. We gathered photographs from exhibitions around the country, refined the concept, and imagined how floral interpretations could interact with Anderson House's remarkable collection and historic interiors.

We revised.

We refined.

We pitched.

And then we got our answer.

No.

It was gracious. It was thoughtful.

And it was still no.

After nearly a decade of trying to make Art in Bloom happen in Washington, another door had closed.

So I went back to work.

And then the world stopped.

The Rejection That Made the Exhibition Possible

In March 2020, COVID-19 brought the events industry to an almost instantaneous halt.

Weddings disappeared from calendars. Museums closed. Public gatherings stopped. The rooms where many of us made our living suddenly sat empty.

My floral business came to a grinding halt.

Anderson House faced the same reality. A building normally filled with weddings, lectures, tours, dinners, and cultural events had gone quiet.

Then an email arrived from Glenn.

What if people couldn't come to Anderson House?

Could we bring Anderson House to them?

What if we created a virtual Art in Bloom?

I didn't hesitate.

Absolutely.

After years of trying to explain what Art in Bloom could be, we suddenly had an opportunity to show it.

The pandemic had created a problem no one wanted, but it had also created a strange opening. A virtual exhibition didn't need to function like a traditional museum event. We could create something experimental, photograph it, film it, and allow people to experience Anderson House and floral art from their homes.

Around that same time, the final piece of our founding team fell into place.

Margot Fischer, founder of Bright Occasions, joined Glenn and me as our third co-founder.

The three of us brought very different things to the project.

I had carried the original idea and the artistic vision. Glenn understood Anderson House and had been the first person there to believe the idea belonged in its rooms. Margot understood how to take a complicated idea and actually make it happen.

Timelines. Logistics. Communication. Operations. Coordination.

The invisible architecture behind an event.

Without all three of us, Art in Bloom DC would never have become what it did.

And without Anderson House being willing to take a chance on an unusual idea during an extraordinary moment in history, the dream might still be sitting in one of my old proposals.

There is a temptation, when telling the story of something that ultimately succeeded, to make its path look inevitable.

It wasn't.

Art in Bloom DC was born from years of rejection, one nearly missed conversation over a glass of rosé, another rejection, a global pandemic, and three people who eventually found themselves in the right place at the right time with complementary skills.

The thing I had spent almost a decade trying to force into existence finally happened when the world made our original plan impossible.

Perhaps that is the part of the story I understand differently now.

For years, I thought persistence meant continuing to knock on the same door until someone finally opened it.

Sometimes it does.

But sometimes persistence means carrying an idea long enough for the right door to appear.

Art in Bloom had not died during all those years of rejection.

It was waiting.

And in 2021, in the middle of a moment when almost everything else seemed to stop, it finally began to bloom.

Author's disclosure: This essay was developed with the assistance of AI as an editorial, organizational, and critical analysis tool. The ideas, arguments, final editorial judgments, and authorship are my own. AI was used to accelerate drafting, editing, and refinement while preserving my responsibility for the work's content and conclusions.