Robert Washington-Vaughns dumped the “capitalistic dream” to start Black Men Flower Project, a fanciful gifting initiative with the muscle of a mutual aid organization.

SANTA FE—“It’s just like, where you go to die,” says Robert Washington-Vaughns. He’s describing the hospice center across the street from the outpatient mental health program he attended in 2018—but also the vibe of that moment in his young life.
Washington-Vaughns had recently been kicked out of college for the second time, and was crashing on his mom’s couch in Columbus, Ohio. (He now has his associate’s degree and is going for his bachelor’s, both in business.) “[Every day] she would drive me downtown and drop me off, like, figure it out,” he says. “Every time I tried to get some rest, it was, ‘You got to keep hustling… you’re not successful yet.’”
From inside this “capitalistic dream,” interrupting the hustle felt like an existential threat—“I’m doing nothing. Will I still get paid? Will I die?” On the sprawling grounds of the hospice center, the galloping deer and leaping fish seemed unconcerned, as did the “bugs, berries, twigs, blades of grass,” and the flowers.
It comes down to using flowers as a hammer to bring change.
Smash cut to early January, and Washington-Vaughns paces between buckets bursting with flowers, working with a small, all-Black team of collaborators to arrange them throughout Santa Fe Community Gallery. His pop-up exhibition Free Our Flowers, on view through February 4 and funded by the Santa Fe Arts and Culture Department’s grant program Art is the Solution, celebrates his national nonprofit initiative Black Men Flower Project.
Founded in 2021 in Columbus, the project’s premise is deceptively simple: it’s finally time to give Black men their flowers. Its execution is ornate, taking the form of rainbow-colored, endorphin-boosting bouquets platonically gifted between exceptional Black men. Free Our Flowers features photographs by Washington-Vaughns of men who’ve nominated each other (and sometimes, themselves), and tales of the project’s wide-ranging activities and effects.
With a feature in People Magazine and other accolades, Black Men Flower Project may seem like Washington-Vaughns’s hard-fought vehicle for professional success. But individualism fell out of the picture as he began wielding blooms as community-building multitools. “Basically, it comes down to using flowers as a hammer to bring change,” he says.

“Okay, there’s too many flowers around the rim, let’s leave some gaps,” Washington-Vaughns calls up to Ansely Emeanuwa, an Albuquerque-based florist and frequent project collaborator. Balancing on a ladder, Emeanuwa nods and starts shifting an arrangement that encircles a makeshift basketball hoop with a plywood backboard.
Washington-Vaughns rolls up his sleeve to display a forearm tattoo of a broken ensō circle, a tribute to the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of wabi-sabi that he studied during the mental health curriculum. Wabi-sabi embraces impermanence, informing his asymmetrical style of flower arranging. “An open circle represents imperfection,” Washington-Vaughns says. “Nothing in nature is perfect, so why are we trying to be perfect?”
It took a few years for the lessons Washington-Vaughns absorbed at the treatment center to manifest into Black Men Flower Project. In 2023, he was living in Chicago and working on a new iteration of the initiative when he was offered a job as a project manager at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “We did a soft relaunch in the New Year, but then ABC 7 Chicago got wind of it,” he says. “The first delivery is to this coffee shop owner, and there’s a cameraman there, and the florist comes in with this big bouquet of flowers. And literally after we got done shooting I’m like, ‘Okay, bye, I’m going to Santa Fe now!'”
I want to give flowers to everybody, right? [But let’s] start with the least likely candidates.
He relaunched the project yet again in the Southwest, but also kept it running in Chicago and started engaging far-flung florists to deliver bouquets to nominees across the United States. His future plans for the project are even more ambitious. “I want to give flowers to everybody, right?” he says. “[But let’s] start with the least likely candidates, let’s start with Black men. It’s almost an alignment of our society to say who deserves flowers [and] who doesn’t.”
The basketball hoop is one of numerous found or assembled objects adorned with blooms in the Free Our Flowers exhibition—they cascade from a shovel, encrust the hilt of a sword, and crown a gym locker—each corresponding with one of Washington-Vaughns’s portraits. The hoop is a nod to his childhood in Chicago, when he and his friends would nail a milk crate to a telephone pole and shoot hoops.
His family attended Saint Sabina Church with pastor Michael Pfleger, “a white pastor with an all-black congregation—very controversial,” Washington-Vaughns says. “[Pfleger’s] adopted son got killed in gang violence, [so] he created his own ‘gang territory’ around the church,” he says. He recalls the sense of security this afforded him, and the toy drives and turkey giveaways that made his family’s Christmases “grand.” “Just seeing that action, and being a part of that community of growth, it’s like, I’ve been an activist and part of these stories for a long time.”

This is the true spirit of Black Men Flower Project; trading bouquets is the catalyst, but strengthening community is the ultimate goal. “If people are worried about rent, or child support, or visitation rights, or losing their job—those hands can’t hold flowers, right?” says Washington-Vaughns. Free Our Flowers features a poster of a somatic release workshop series for Black men hosted by Washington-Vaughns and Santa Fe–based multidisciplinary artist Trey Pickett last year.
“We were there to heal together, to sit in circles and be childlike,” says Washington-Vaughns. “Something kind of dislodged and I started crying. I think flowers do the same thing on a more temporal level.” He acknowledges that this type of vulnerability—of accepting flowers, or crying together—can be rare among men, even if they’re family. And it can also be dangerous, at least in public. Black Men Flower Project’s initiatives are carefully calibrated to protect their participants, and fold into social settings that uplift Black men in multifaceted ways.
“If there’s an org that works with youth development, or does résumé-building classes, or [spotlights] great Black men… how can we pair this with flowers?” Washington-Vaughns says of the project’s programming. He’s currently in talks with the Penitentiary of New Mexico outside Santa Fe to host flower-arranging classes for inmates, so that their arrangements can be sold on the outside to generate income. Part of the vision is to partner with a reentry program to help men “pick up a toolset” for after their release. “We’ll give you a bouquet, we’ll build a résumé, and we’ll break down those walls of the nonprofit industrial complex,” he says.
Men only receive flowers on their deathbed or during their funeral. I want to change that, it’s kind of disgusting.
Emeanuwa, the florist who furnished Free Our Flowers, has been zigzagging around the Santa Fe Community Gallery during my conversation with Washington-Vaughns. The opening reception is that evening and there are hundreds of flowers to disperse. In one corner of the show is an altar to men and women from the Black Men Flower Project community who have died in the past year. I finally catch Emeanuwa in a still moment, although his hands are packed with flowers. “Not often do Black men get flowers,” he says, his eyes flickering across an arrangement in search of an opening. “Men only receive flowers on their deathbed or during their funeral. I want to change that, it’s kind of disgusting.”
Emeanuwa started his business, Live Flowers by Ansely, in 2010, but he’s been arranging for most of his life. His family owns six acres in Albuquerque, where they cultivate food and flowers. The original idea was to be self-sufficient, but they’ve raised such abundance that the family farm is a significant food bank donor, feeding thousands during the Covid-19 pandemic. “We have twenty plots of lavender, and then wildflowers,” Emeanuwa says. “When I was about five or six, I started selling arrangements at the farmers market for two dollars. Then people started being generous and paying more.”
Emeanuwa’s first collaboration with Black Men Flower Project was during Juneteenth last year, when they gave out fifty bouquets on the Santa Fe Plaza. He’d read the People story about Washington-Vaughns, but didn’t know he’d moved to the area. “I was like, I pray, I hope that I get to work with him,” says Emeanuwa. “[Men] need to understand flowers bring joy, even with any sadness. A pop of color changes everything, it literally lifts up everyone’s endorphins. So accepting flowers, it shouldn’t be a fear.”











