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.

The exhibit will include photographs, documents, and an audio tour.  Copies of Kim’s book about the homesteads will be available for purchase, as well.  The Red Arrow is at 61010 Hwy 62 in Joshua Tree.

Art Tours is bustin’ out all over the Basin this weekend and next, including “Tromp l’Oeil on Cabin…a mural in progress…being painted at Judy Wold’s homestead cabin” at 60433 Sonora Rd. in Joshua Tree. 

At Feral Studios Julie Tolentino and Stosh Fila are curating a “pop-up gallery of works featuring artists and friends from New York, Los Angeles, Beirut, Berlin, and London…All work will be staged within, on, around the walls of the pre-existing 1940′s homestead cabin/studio adjacent to Tolentino’s tiny-off-grid solar powered home.”

October 22-23 and 29-30, 2011, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.   From Hwy 62 left on Sunfair. Top of Sunfair turns into a dirt road: Coyote Valley Road.  Take this to the top where it crosses with Daisy Lane, Homestead cabin is on the right.

Deborah Martin’s new (very new – when I wandered into the gallery just before opening some were not quite finished!) realist paintings of Wonder Valley are on exhibition at The Red Arrow Gallery in Joshua Tree this month.  

I don’t have a copy of the Editorial Introduction by Alison Simonis posted at the show, but from Martin’s Website:

Her painted depictions of remnants and relics of this quasi ghost valley settlement of homesteads born out of a 1938 Federal Land Grant comprise a portrait of a place in metamorphosis.

Intimately coupled with the weathering austerities of the Mojave Desert, these outposts of human habitation exhibit an obvious struggle for survival.

Martin showcases a frontier of existential befuddlement: a seemingly confused pondering whether to persist, give up or renew amidst the trappings of domicile.

The rise and fall of opportunity, hope and longing present themselves, eerily, in these paintings.

The question looms whether an insubordinate Wild West is staging a mockery over the American materialist fantasy.

A special reception co-sponsored by Red Arrow and JTAG will be held on October 22 as part of this year’s Hwy 62 Art Tours.  Music by Tim Easton and guests.   4-6 p.m., 61597 Twentynine Palms Highway, Joshua Tree.

Homesteading is not new, and a trove of personalized postcards from a hundred years ago brings to life how much we may have in common with another set of homesteaders at a different frontier.  From “Homesteaders Show Off Their Claim Shacks”: 

Personalized postcards became a fad in the early 20^th century; you could get any photo printed on photo paper stock and send it in the mail. The following are postcards of homesteaders in front of their new residences in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana, taken between 1907 to 1920. The subjects are dressed in their finest garments; they sent the cards to family members in other parts of the country to show off their new lives. 

Accompanying the image above is the following:

Homesteading created an opportunity for women to own property for the first time. Many even built their own homes. Out West on these big, undeveloped expanses of land, they could start over, relatively free from scrutiny. “There are stories of lesbians going on homesteads together,” says Michael Williams, who has collected thousands of homesteader postcards over the years. “It was this really unusual gathering of people.”

View the whole slideshow, including some of the handwritten messages, on Slate.com.

A fun video from Japan on Joshua Tree as art oasis in the desert.  Features lots of Wonder Valley, including The Palms, the Sibleys, WV artist Thom Merrick, Jeff Hafler and the Beauty Bubble and Museum, and beaucoup creosotes blowin’ in the wind.  Also, Eames Demetrios at his wild Krblin Jihn Kabin in JT, expounding on the the wonders of deterioration.  Noah Purifoy and the 29 Palms Creative Center are included, as well.

The viewpoint is a little unclear to me as the narration is in Japanese, but the locals, and the beauty of our crazy desert, speak for themselves.

Angela Carone interviews artists Kim Stringfellow and Claire Zitzow in the 30-minute audio program “Desert Jackrabbit Homesteads Inspire Artists.”  

While driving through the California desert, you may come across derelict shacks spotting the landscape. These homesteads, called jackrabbits, were built by people laying claim to plots of desert land in response to the Small Tract Act of 1938. Our guests, both artists, have explored the jackrabbits in their work, through photographs, audio tours, sculpture and installation.

Kim’s work has been featured on this blog many times; learn more about her project at jackrabbithomestead.com.  Claire Zitzow’s solo exhibition “Jackrabbits and the Crow: On Dwelling and Passing” is on view through Dec. 10 at the Andrews Gallery in San Diego.

Above is a photo of Zitzow’s “desert-based installation and jackrabbit homestead built by artist Claire Zitzow.  The walls and sides are composed of paper, so the wind and elements slowly deteriorated the structure over time, not unlike the real jackrabbits it is based on.”

Anyone who has shopped there knows Mary and appreciates her unflagging and unflappable presence.  Rain or shine, freeze or bake, Mary is there, comforted by all the technological relief Wonder Valley can muster – in other words, she must really suffer to bring us these bargains!  The shop is famously open Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays from 9 to noon all year round, including the doggiest days of summer, when that tiny building stuffed to the rafters with “stuff” can reeeally roast.

Somehow Mary keeps things pleasantly organized, so the sheer volume of merchandise does not cause overwhelming paralysis or, heaven forbid, paralyzing accidents.  And the goods are in the best tradition of serendipity, treasures and trash tumbled together and may your curiousity profit with sorting them out.   How often have I admired a Valley resident’s latest acquisition, be it decor, apparel, or something uncategorizable, and received the proud response, “Wonder Valley Thrift!”   By which they mean not only should you notice their taste, but also that they paid dirt for it!   The prices at WV Thrift cannot be beat.

The Thrift is a production of the Wonder Valley Hiking Club, which has been around for ages but gave up the hiking long ago.  The Club, and the Thrift, are entirely dedicated to supporting the WV fire department.  Your donations of goods, time, or cash are always welcome!

You can view the profile of Mary and the Thrift here (PDF; go to p. 5).

Also in that edition of the Spirit is an article on the Cleghorn Lakes Wilderness Area, another secret treasure of Wonder Valley; see p. 11 at the same link above.

The humble homestead cabins have found their way into this year’s Annual Desert Writers Issue of The Sun Runner.   Included is an uncharacteristically sober verse and drawing by recent Morongo Basin transplant Rik Livingston, as well as the above charming pastel and water color “Starry Starry Wonder” by Lisa Maher.  We’ve written about Lisa and her 3rd-generation homestead before.  You can read about her latest trip to Wonder, which inspired this painting, on her blog.

There’s lots of good desert writing in this issue, so be sure to pick up a copy before they run out.  Find out where at thesunrunner.com.

Wonder Valley’s own Beauty Bubble Salon and Museum has been in the news.   Here’s how Jeff Hafler’s creation is described in an April 21 travel piece on Joshua Tree boutique hotels in the New York Times on-line:

Then there’s the Beauty Bubble: an unclassifiable one-chair salon tucked inside a replica 1930s homestead cabin that Hafler has turned into a showcase for vintage beauty-shop bric-a-brac. Bubbles were popular 1960s hairdos, and as Hafler notes, “The higher the hair, the closer to God.” Of the more than 2,000 objects that the self-described “hairstorian” (it’s California, go with it) started collecting back in his beauty school days, his most cherished is a 1940 Duart Perm Machine that belonged to Veronica Lake’s hairstylist.

Last month part of the Beauty Museum collection traveled to San Francisco for the exhibition Beauty Shop Culture at the venerable SOMArts Cultural Center:

Award-winning photographer, writer and cultural critic Candacy A. Taylor, presents Beauty Shop Culture, an exhibition that explores the beauty shop as a community-based institution and addresses issues of gender, race, class and identity.  For centuries hair salons have functioned as makeshift communities where people gather to discuss everything from intimate family sagas, food, and pop culture, to finances, politics, philosophy and health.  For the exhibition Beauty Shop Culture, Taylor employs photographic documentation, installation and sculpture to explore the contemporary manifestations of beauty shops as a form of community space, and to highlight traditions and history of hair, hair care products, potions and pomades from various cultures throughout the world beginning in the sixteenth century.

Community-based institution, indeed.   Who needs a newspaper when you got the Beauty Bubble? 

Image of the Beauty Museum above from the Beauty Bubble/Moon Way Lodge website.

Desert fan Bernard Leibov is opening his New York microgallery, BoxoFFICE, to Joshua Tree artist Diane Best’s homestead cabins in the show SHACK, “a solo exhibition of large-scale black and white photography. ”

SHACK features images of cabins in the area around Joshua Tree, some occupied, some abandoned, some close to being reclaimed by the earth.

The Mojave Desert was one of the last places in the lower 48 where land was granted free to anyone willing to improve the land. The cabins featured in the photographs were built as a result of one of the last homesteading acts passed, The Small Tract Act of 1938, that granted 5 acre parcels “for such purposes as home, cabin, health and recreational sites”. The Small Tract Act  was also known as the  “Jack Rabbit Act”  as some people considered the desert land “fittin’ only for jack rabbits and tumbleweeds”.

The 5 acre plots were leased for 5 years for a nominal fee ($99. per year), and if a structure was built that was at least 12′ X 16′, the leaseholder could buy the property for $120. an acre. Water and power were not required. Many cabins were carefully built by weekend desert lovers, but many more were flimsily erected by land speculators and were never inhabited.

The artist herself says, “Living in the desert,  surrounded by these reminders of the past – many deserted with their contents intact, slowly blowing apart, decaying, and vandalized – I am fascinated by the question of their owner’s intent and untold stories of arrival, building and departure.”

Diane’s work was part of our Wonder Valley Homestead Cabin Festival together with that of Mary-Austin Klein in the Shack Appreciation Show at Trader Jeff’s.  The image above is Shack 21, (34 x 50 in., archival pigment print on dibond, 2010).  See more of Diane’s images on her website, along with a book available of her cabin photos.  She also has a new video, “SHACKS”, that will be featured in the BoxoFFICE exhibition.  Here’s hoping we get to see it back here at home soon! 

SHACK runs May 22 to July 10, with reception on May 22 from 6 to 8 p.m.  BoxoFFICE is at 421 Hudson Street #701 in New York.   More info at the BoxoFFICE website.   Also find Bernard and BoxOFFICE in an article on microgalleries in the New York Times.