Jackrabbit Homestead
Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape
Distributed for Center for American Places
The landscape of the Morongo Basin of Southern California’s Mojave Desert is dotted with unusual buildings and parcels of land that developed as a result of the Small Tract Act of 1938. The structures, which are remnants of a mid-century homestead movement, have become a lightning rod for seemingly disparate communities wishing to claim and inhabit the desert landscape.
In Jackrabbit Homestead, Kim Stringfellow, an artist and writer known for her cross-disciplinary work addressing the American West, land use, and the built environment, documents the character of the homestead architecture and the homesteaders who built it. Alongside her compelling photographs, she explores the origins of the Homestead movement, the Public Land Survey, and other U.S. public land policies that have shaped our perception and long-term management of the California desert.
Richly illustrated with Stringfellow’s color photographs and historical illustrations, Jackrabbit Homestead is an essential document of American landscape history.
“Kim Stringfellow has invented her own genre, a fusion of cultural geography/tour guide and artist’s book. These books are unique as environmental and local histories that are up-to-date, readable (!), and imaginatively illustrated. I’d welcome her into my neighborhood any time.”—Lucy R. Lippard, author of The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society and Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the 20th Century
“Stringfellow’s mix of natural and cultural history, social criticism, and art is a smart and succinct addition to the top shelf of desert geographies.”—Bill Fox, author of In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle
“Stringfellow attacks her subject as a historian, a collector, and a photographer with the vision of a Walker Evans on acid.”—Danny Lyon, author of The Bikeriders and Conversations with the Dead
Map of the Morongo Basin and Vicinity
Introduction
A Brief History of Jackrabbit Homestead
Artists, Off-Roaders, and the American Dream Writ Miniature
The Plates
Notes on the Text
Patents for Pages 66-67
About the Mapping Process
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Art: Photography
Geography: Cultural and Historical Geography
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