Pike School of Art – Mississippi (PSA-MS) has entered into a long-term lease agreement with the City of McComb, Miss., for property formerly housing the Pike County Youth Detention Center. PSA-MS intends to convert the building into a community art center, with exhibition spaces, studio classrooms and accommodation for visiting and resident artists.

2022-2024:

Pike School of Art will work with the Sea Level Rise Architectural Intervention Institute (S.L.R.A.I.I.). S.L.R.A.I.I. was formed in 2018 — as a collaboration between artists Laurencia Strauss and Jason Lazarus — in order to create awareness of sea level rise projection models in everyday as well as formal/institutional spaces. The installations of future calendar years and their corresponding installation height correlate with the height of predicted mean sea level corresponding to a range of reputable climate change models. S.L.R.A.I.I. will be commissioned to create a permanent site-specific installation indicating sea level rise projections for the Pike School of Art facility, to debut in 2024.

2022-2024:

Independently, Jason Lazarus will extend his residency to allow time to research the history of protests in McComb. Since 2003, his work has sought experiential forms and methods to grapple with the politics of representation — often engaging communities in collective research and image making. Lazarus will use his time in McComb to create a monument, his first permanent site-specific artwork informed by the history and present of the McComb community, debuting in 2024.