Pike School of Art – Mississippi (PSA-MS) is a space for interdisciplinary creative experimentation where artists and writers with diverse backgrounds and proficiencies come together and interact in a rural setting in America’s Deep South. PSA-MS offers residencies, workshops, talks, and space for art-making and discursive research. Activities take place in and near the city of McComb and the town of Summit in Pike County, Mississippi. PSA-MS encourages artwork and curatorial or writing projects that create articulations about the Deep South, including Mississippi’s and Louisiana’s histories of conflict and adjustment between Old and New World societies and Europeans’ early relationship with the indigenous populations. Projects about the ongoing African-American struggle to achieve full participation in American society are especially welcome.

Activities are based in the residency facilities with excursions to regional cultural centers that may include Jackson, the state capital (Mississippi Museum of Art, the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion, the Old Capitol Museum, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s campus, the International Museum of Muslim Cultures), Biloxi (Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art campus, designed by Frank Gehry, and Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis’ home and presidential library), and Natchez (Grand Village of the Natchez Indians and theNatchez Trace Parkway).

Two-week residencies include two days in New Orleans with visits to Prospect New Orleans (when in session), the Contemporary Arts Center, the McKenna Museum of African American Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Louisiana State Museum, including the Cabildo and the Presbytère. A side trip to Baton Rouge includes a visit to theCapitol Park Museum, designed by New Orleans-based studio Eskew+Dumez+Ripple and completed in 2006.