Join us for a special conversation between Pickett and writer Jami Attenberg on Thursday, October 30 at 6pm. RSVP here.
“Objects that are cherished in this way really are born of an intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined by geometric reality. For they produce a new reality of being, and they take their place not only in an order but in a community of order.…From one object in a room to another, housewifely care weaves the ties that unite a very ancient past to the new epoch. The housewife awakens furniture that was asleep.”
—Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace (The Poetics of Space), 1964
BROOKE PICKETT x JORDAN AMIRKHANI
Jordan Amirkhani (JA): I’ve been thinking about how you fold the terms “domestic” and “domesticity” alongside threads of building and making into descriptions of your work, describing both the inside of the home and the ways we build our communities. I’d love to hear how that notion of building and making has come through this new group of works.
Brooke Pickett (BP): I’ve always been drawn to the language of construction, building a home, laying foundations, structural support. But I’m interested in using that same language to talk about mutual aid frameworks and social safety nets, because I think we’ve been sold a lie about what home means and who gets access to it.
We all carry this idealized version of what a house and home should be. But there’s a vast gap between that promise and the reality of who gets to live safely inside a home and what’s promised in exchange for domestic labor. The title Home Economics pulls on threads I’ve been working with for years, about who performs domestic labor, who gets compensated, and what’s promised in return.
I’m thinking about this particular political moment. Since November of last year, roughly 212,000 women have been forced out of the labor market while about 50,000 men have entered it. I’m concerned about who gets to work, who has access to money, and what that means for liberation and safety. I’m worried about women being forced back into the home and what rights we’ll have to fight for all over again.
JA: The home as a space is already shaped by the expectation of who gets to be there, who needs to be there, and who can exit on their own terms. So many political fights have been shaped around this notion of home. This brings me to the scale of your paintings. I get excited when women paint on a grand scale, taking up more space, literally. I want to ask you about scale, because the space these paintings take up in the gallery feels really meaningful.
BP: I started working at this scale in graduate school. I was 10 or 15 years younger than most people in my program, and many of the painters were older men who had no problem taking up space. I was Southern, petite, a woman; I felt like everything was working against me. So I decided to make massive paintings. My first instinct was: I will force you to take me seriously by making work that’s bigger and better than anyone else here.
That scale did demand attention and respect. But about 5 years ago, I realized most of my paintings are my own wingspan; they’re human scale now. When I stand in front of them working, I don’t see a white wall. I see only the world I’m building. And I don’t know how to build a world smaller than that.
JA: You speak in your artist statement about mobilizing the terms and activities of constructing and building into your practice. Can you share more about this notion of building a world as a painter and feeling solidarity with the values and terms of mutual aid and organizations that build in the world for others?
BP: I grew up moving constantly. I learned to put down temporary roots quickly, or at least I created this fantasy of how to build a home and friendships overnight. I built my own sense of safety and security, even if it was a false narrative. I needed it to feel secure in the world. That experience taught me that safety is something we construct collectively, not something that’s given to us.
I’m drawn to the language of construction and mutual aid because they’re both about creating infrastructure, whether that’s physical structures or social safety nets. When I talk about building in my work, I’m appropriating the language of construction workers, off-the grid survivalists, and community organizers. I want to reframe mutual aid frameworks not as charity, but as essential infrastructure. It’s about insisting that the ways we take care of each other are foundational, not optional.
In my studio, I’m building temporary dioramas from things that have been thrown away, that no longer serve their “productive” purpose. I’m salvaging them, giving them new life and meaning. That gesture mirrors what mutual aid does: It recognizes value where capitalism says there is none. It insists that broken things, discarded things, people pushed to the margins—they all matter. They’re worthy of care.
A big part of my practice is building these still lifes in my studio, their own worlds that exist for maybe 15 minutes. Sometimes I’ll build 3 or 4 in a day. Each has its own language, symbols, and codes that become permanent in the paintings. But here’s the thing: I’m not just building private worlds in my studio. I’m trying to visualize what collective care looks like, what it means to prepare for disaster together, to recognize that in New Orleans, in any sinking city, any place facing climate crisis, we survive through each other. The paintings become a kind of blueprint for that. They’re about radical hope and the dissociation required to keep building in the face of collapse, yes, but they’re also about the necessity of building together, of creating networks that catch us when everything else fails.
JA: I’ve always felt joy looking at your paintings. You have a particular and beautiful color palette, and your brush strokes feel like a way of carving out objects into space. But I also recognize that the themes aren’t so bright or cheery. Could you elaborate on this tension between the friendliness in how you arrange composition and colors, and the torque in how you’re building space that throws everything off scale?
BP: I love hearing you describe them as beautiful or friendly, because many people consider them garish or hard to look at. And I’m okay with that, because one of my goals has always been to push against historical ideas of what a beautiful painting is. The more I’ve learned about color, the more I love playing against the idea of historically feminine painting—whatever that even means. Each time I startworking, I try to combine colors I’ve never combined before. It becomes a personal challenge: Am I good enough to make this fairly hideous color combination work?
This is absolutely intentional and tied to women’s work, making hard, painful, things tenable, if not beautiful. I’m committed to discussing difficult truths about loss and pain, but I deliver them in overly bright colors and compositions so you might be willing to initiate that conversation. When people find the paintings beautiful, that’s a byproduct, not the initial message.
My paintings only work when there’s the right balance of struggle, maybe even gore. I’m deeply interested in creating spaces that seem livable or proper until you spend more than 10 seconds with them and realize the bottom is falling out, the space is collapsing in on itself. They’re not comfortable. But the paintings need enough beauty to hold your attention long enough to understand the message. Beauty is one of the tools in our toolkit to get our message across; women know this. We perform certain things and use beauty to do so. That happens in the paintings, too.
JA: In your recent paintings, there’s this interesting camouflage or dazzling with pattern on pattern, different patterns very close to each other. The forms, colors, and shapes squeeze against each other like puzzle pieces your eye has to deal with simultaneously. The optical illusions make looking hard, which I think is politically charged. This notion that you can’t stay in one place to absorb the world, but you have to be nimble to get through it.
BP: I’m grateful you’ve given the work time to notice that. Much of this comes from embracing textiles, representing them more and more in the work. It’s something I hid from for a long time. When I was younger, I was insecure about being perceived as a woman who paints domestic spaces and textiles; it felt minimizing. I struggled against it, then finally thought: fuck it. Who decided that was negative instead of politically charged?
Textiles are incredibly political. I studied quilts made by enslaved people in college and grad school. They’re an early form of political communication and resistance. I see textiles as the earliest form of gendered language and communication and as symbols of beauty and protection. I learned to quilt in my early 20s and still do. The quilts aren’t necessarily part of my creative process, but they end up in the paintings, a nod to the history of women’s work, labor, and language. They’re evidence of time women spent together in a room, what they talked about and felt.
JA: Do you feel like you brought something into the studio in particular for this new body of work that’s important to share? I ask because I know how significant writing and text was to your last series.
BP: What I’ve been thinking about most is women’s work, who gets to work, who gets to work outside the home, who’s forced to work inside it, and who determines the value of domestic labor.
I’ve been working on these paintings for about 10 or 11 months. Each show is an archive of a year of work, thinking, frustrations, and battles. One major inspiration is the history of home economics and how that movement was designed to liberate women from the home. It was powered by women scientists, chemists mostly, who believed you could operationalize aspects of housework that had been relegated to women. They thought: Bring science into the home and liberate women. Show women this doesn’t have to be the sum of who we are.
At first it was wildly popular. Then, of course, it backfired. That was the turn of the 19th century, and I see so many parallels to now—the same messaging, the same ideas of liberation, followed by massive political and social pushbacks pressuring women back into the home full-time.
I believe everyone deserves a space to call their own, a sense of safety and security. I’m deeply troubled by the idea of home as utopia or as a promised sense of safety that one person gives another, especially forced to work inside it, and who determines the value of domestic labor.
JA: I think we’re living through a very successful retelling right now of (white) individuals espousing that feminism “didn’t work” alongside the understanding that many other women and communities (women of color, women of different socioeconomic means, immigrant and refugee women) were already not given the same rights and equities inside the home from the beginning.
BP: Right. We’re being sold the fallacy of home through fascism and the patriarchy to keep women out of the workplace and out of positions of power. But homes have historically been places of resistance. The home is politically charged, and I want my work to insist on that.
JA: I’m excited for other people to spend time with this body of work, because these are paintings made in and of the people and places and things in New Orleans. Painting, as a genre, is always doing a past/future play that resonates with this city. It’s a deeply historical medium shaped by its past and the generations of painters that came before. I wondered if you have anything to say about that specific local temporal aspect of these works?
BP: Being from this area, so much of my work is shaped by not knowing how long you’ll have your home with accelerated climate crises. I have a lot of anger and frustration about the narrative around New Orleans—how and why it was built, how it’s been exploited and used and then not properly supported or loved in return. And yet, despite how this shows up in my work, I’m actually a very optimistic person. Maybe it’s cruel optimism, loving things that aren’t necessarily in my best interest, staying in that tension. But I do believe there are beautiful answers and responses to the problems we’re dealing with, and I believe that the future is in the community, in the people who live here and take care of each other.
Brooke Pickett is a painter based in New Orleans whose work explores the relationship women have to the home—to the domestic environment, to their own bodies, and to family. Pickett’s studio practice includes arranging and building still life scenes, finding objects in the street and secondhand stores, items that have been discarded. Pickett salvages them and their stories—lampshades, metal and plastic bins, old toys, playful and delicate sheets, floatation devices, brooms + stools—creating a still life landscape of distortion, innocence, hopefulness. Underneath the carefully placed colors is the relentless pursuit to playfully yet urgently rearrange our lives, our memories, our homes in spite of the fact, or precisely because, our world—the infrastructure of our democracy, nation, cities, homes—is crumbling.
Jordan Amirkhani is a writer, curator, educator, and editor based in Brooklyn, NY. She has published work on artists Tina Girouard, Helen Cammock, Wendy Red Star, Sheida Soleimani, and Vesna Pavlović, and her essays and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, X-TRA, and Burnaway.
Other Plans is a contemporary art gallery located at the intersection of Dumaine and Galvez Streets in New Orleans, Louisiana. Founded in 2023 by Emily Wilkerson, the gallery presents solo and two-person exhibitions by an inter-generational group of artists whose practices address the most pressing issues of our time.
A printed version of this interview was published in conjunction with Brooke Pickett: Home Economics, Other Plans, 2025. Design by Collection of Collections and printed by constance. To receive a copy of this publication, contact us at info@otherplans.gallery.