Homemaking and Remaking with Artist Brooke Pickett

By Emily Alesandrini
March 31, 2026

Brooke Pickett, The Idea of Home, 2025, flashe and oil on canvas, 84 x 60 inches. Image courtesy of Other Plans.

Between 2020 and 2024, Louisiana’s population declined by over 70,000 residents. At the close of this past year, domestic migration researchers identified Louisiana as the state with the highest percentage of outbound moves. Many New Orleans-based artists I speak with say things like, We’re planning on Chicago in two years, when the kids are ready for school, or I’m headed to Detroit in May; I just can’t rebuild again. Building back a life comes with monumental economic and emotional costs, especially when that foundation feels so precarious every June, when hurricane season begins again.   

I have had such conversations with artist Brooke Pickett, a Louisiana native for whom “home making” is a creative practice. During a recent studio visit, she tells me about choosing new kitchen tiles for a home she knows will flood again, a process she compares to “rearranging chairs on a sinking ship.” She adds solemnly: “Home is a false promise of safety.” And yet, we titter for joy over kitchen tile selections and wall paper samples. The mammoth paintings surrounding our chatter assert a delightful friction, dissonance, and disorientation of pattern and shape. My eye finds what could be read as abstracted cheese graters, telephone cords, teakettle handles, and open umbrellas, all layered with checkered rugs, striped seat cushions, and stitched blankets that obey their own notion of perspective and horizon line. The artist describes the desire to explore and then collapse space in each work while giving her subject matter a “dazzling camouflage effect” or “the Betty Woodman treatment.”

Brooke Pickett, Domestic Arts, 2025, flashe and oil on canvas, 84 x 60 inches. Image courtesy of Other Plans. 

Pickett begins her creative process by installing still lifes of found household items like mops, lampshades, baskets and the like, which she then sketches and photographs. She also makes quilts from family clothing or thrift stores. The paintings, usually realized in a series of around ten, come to fruition after these initial exercises. “I’m working something out in the quilts and when I’m done, I can make a painting,” she explains. Pickett designs and dyes her own textiles too, but I don’t see these or her quilts, photos, drawings, or still life installations in, for example, her recent solo exhibition, Home Economics, at Other Plans gallery in New Orleans (October 17 - December 14, 2025). Her oil paintings loom large. I love them, but I can’t help but feel like she’s left some good stuff at home, tucked away because it might be called “craft.” I wish she would let these various mediums out to play, to sit and stack alongside one another, for what I’m sure would be some raucous material conversations and further points of connection. 

The size of her paintings themselves, the width of Pickett’s wingspan, asserts an importance of subject that claps back at inherited templates of so-called “history painting” in oil on canvas. There is perhaps also an echo of Vermeer-like genre painting in this work, of tapestries framed by curtains framed by window sills above floor tiles and tablecloths. Perhaps most profoundly, Pickett paints textile on textile, honoring the base of the material itself as perhaps inherently “feminine.” Her cacophonic textile subject matter points to the warp and weft of the canvas itself as an unseen or covered pattern most often taken for granted by the viewer. What might it mean to consider all painting on canvas as work in textile?

Installation view of Brooke Pickett: Home Economics, on view at Other Plans from October 17 - December 14, 2025. Image courtesy of Other Plans.

This article was supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.