Project Website: jackrabbithomestead.com
Project Dates: 2006-2021
Publication: Jackrabbit Homestead (2023)
Jackrabbit Homestead is a published book, exhibit, site-specific installation and downloadable car audio tour exploring the cultural legacy of the Small Tract Act in Southern California’s Morongo Basin region near Joshua Tree National Park. Stories from this underrepresented regional history are told through the voices of local residents, historians, and area artists—many of whom reside in reclaimed historic cabins and use the structures as inspiration for their creative work.
Stringfellow partnered with the Twentynine Palms Historical Society to host a culminating public event that celebrated the public release of the audio tour. Funding for the audio tour was provided in part, by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities as part of the Council’s statewide California Stories Initiative. The Council is an independent non-profit organization and a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. For more information on the Council and the California Stories Initiative, visit calhum.org.
Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938-2008 was published in December 2009 by the Center for American Places. The publication was supported by a generous grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Additional support was also provided through San Diego State University. In 2022, Stringfellow published an updated second edition of the book under her own imprint.
Jackrabbit Homestead was exhibited at the Autry National Center from September 13, 2014 – August 23, 2015, and at UC Riverside’s Culver Center for the Arts in 2013. Jackrabbit Homestead was featured on KCET Artbound—a transmedia project dedicated to the arts and culture of Southern and Central California. ARTE TV featured Kim Stringfellow discussing jackrabbit homesteading in 2022 for a feature on culture in the Mojave Desert.
Desert X 2021
For Desert X 2021, Stringfellow conceived, built and outfitted a 112-square-foot jackrabbit homestead inspired by the writings of Catherine Venn Peterson who wrote a six-part series detailing her mid-century Small Tract homesteading experience for Desert Magazine during 1950—when this highly popular “baby homestead” movement was just burgeoning. Venn’s original homestead was located in Section 36 of Cahuilla Hills off Highway 74 in unincorporated Riverside County near the exclusive Bighorn Golf Club in Palm Desert, California.
Accompanying the cabin, located in downtown Palm Desert where Small Tract cabins had once proliferated before Big Box chains and restaurants took over, is an audio soundscape collaboration between Kim Stringfellow, Georgia-based musician/artist/author Jim White and singer/songwriter Claire M. Campbell (Hope for Agoldensummer), who brought Ms. Venn’s voice to life. Tim Halbur, who has collaborated with Stringfellow for many of her previous audio projects, contributed to the sound design.
The Desert X 2021 cabin is on public view at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center. For directions and to learn more about this site-specific installation commissioned by Desert X, click this link.
To view the photographic portfolio for this project, visit this link.
View the KCET Artbound short film on Jackrabbit Homestead produced in 2012.
