Collective Practice: The Pickett House

CRN

14092

Course Number

336V

Course Description

This advanced art course will position students to work as a collective of artists with the George E. Pickett Memorial in downtown Bellingham. Known as The Pickett House, owned and operated as a museum by the Daughters of Pioneers since 1956, the memorial honors an imperialist slaveholder from Virginia who led the first militarized stages of settler-colonization in our area, the traditional and ancestral territory of the Lhaq'temish (Lummi) and Noxwsʼáʔaq (Nooksack)​ Nations. Pickett would permanently leave these lands five years after building the house to fight for the continued mass enslavement of African Americans in the Civil War. The house, however, is also the birthplace of Pickett's son, Jimmie T. Pickett, whose mother, a First Nations woman from the Northwest Coast (her name and nation are disputed), died after birthing him. Jimmie became an important artist of the Pacific Northwest, representing lands between Portland and Bellingham in highly detailed illustrations and paintings throughout most of his 31 years of life. We will work with, against, and from the highly significant and volatile position the memorial holds and has held in local discourse, as well as its material history and that of its inhabitants, its direct and indirect intersections with national and international conflicts over memorialization, and its potentiality both architecturally, institutionally, and socially. This is a field-intensive course, where most of our sessions will be held at different local institutions--like museums and archives--hosted by different guest speakers and stakeholders, and, weather permitting, most frequently at and around the site itself. Concretely, students will learn how to work together to manifest a collective project with intentional and careful local reach. The form the project takes will be ultimately up to the students, and rooted in gradual research, discussion, and the interweaving of different interests, skills, and backgrounds. This might, for instance, take the form of a performance, a workshop, a demonstration, a speculative proposal, an exhibition, or a film. To support this process, we will study other models of place-based collective artwork, like Preuzmimo Benčić (Take Back Benčić), a film project directed by Althea Thauberger with 70 local children in an abandoned factory of Rijeka, Croatia; the escraches, shaming demonstrations, organized by H.I.J.O.S., children of those disappeared by Argentina's military dictatorship; and the bottom-up architectural projects of DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research) in Palestinian refugee camps and elsewhere.

Prerequisites

FAIR 202a or equivalent

Credit/Evaluation

5

Term

Winter 2022

Course Instructor(s)

Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman