Dr. James Housefield:
Promoting the arts in daily life

Dr. James Housefield

Fall 2006—Dr. James Housefield, an award-winning art history professor at Texas State, says his teaching is motivated by a passionate desire to help students connect the intangible realm of ideas with the physical realm of lived experience. As the 2006-2009 Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities, named by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Dr. Housefield will conduct a three-year interdisciplinary project for the campus and broader community “to unify art and life and to promote a place for the arts and humanities in our daily lives.” He will develop courses that emphasize the integration of life and art through community arts, public art, performance, and technology (e.g. photography). He will also organize film series, lectures, and community events with invited students, faculty, artists, scholars, and curators to lead discussions of the aesthetic, ethical, and everyday issues raised by film, photography, and visual and performing arts. The schedule of events will be announced.

Dr. Housefield in the streets of Paris, investigating public art. This colossal head, "L'Écoute," ("Listening,") located beside the St. Eustache church, near the Pompidou Center's modern art museum, was sculpted by Henri de Miller in 1986.

Dr. Housefield specializes in art movements in which the visual arts and literature are intertwined, such as Dada, Surrealism, and Futurism, and he is also interested in connections among art history, history, geography, language, and philosophy. His NEH project explores “the modern call for the convergence of art and life that has echoed throughout the humanities since 1848."

“This encompasses the rise of the visual arts of Realism and Cubist collage, the introduction of vernacular voices in the poetry of Apollinaire, Cendrars, and Eliot, the use of quotidian gestures in the modern dance of Merce Cunningham, and the late 20th-century interweaving of art and theatre as performance art,” he said, explaining that his project will emphasize the arts of everyday life—from rituals to product design—alongside the traditional emphasis on “high art.” Using resources beyond the University—including museums, organizations, artists, and scholars—he will develop lecture series, discussion panels, film screenings, artistic creation, and new courses, in order to build a dialogue among students, faculty, and the community about the historical and potential integration of art and life. He hopes his programs will also offer faculty the opportunity to think across lines and adapt the discussion of art and life for use in their own classrooms.

Pursuing art's history in the Rodin Museum, Paris, brings Dr. Housefield face to face with the head of Honoré de Balzac (by Auguste Rodin, 1892-1895).

Interdisciplinary questions about the integration of art and life have consistently united Dr. Housefield’s diverse endeavors in teaching and research. He holds the B.A. from Vanderbilt University (1985) in French literature, the M.A. from The University of Texas at Austin (1989) in art history, and the Ph.D. from Boston University (1999) in art history. Known for his experiential approach to teaching, Dr. Housefield received Texas State’s highest teaching honor in 2005, the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching. In nominating Dr. Housefield for the NEH award, a Texas State professor described Dr. Housefield’s teaching as “dazzling . . . He held the attention of every student in the large teaching theater . . . For my own part, I was thinking how much I was learning about the subject at hand, how much more I wanted to learn about it when the class ended, and how much I would like to learn to teach as effectively as Dr. Housefield does.”

Marcel Duchamp is one of the modern artists about whom Dr. Housefield has published extensively. Here, Housefield encounters Duchamp's Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) (1915-23) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In describing Dr. Housefield’s teaching methods, two former students wrote about his technique for explaining art in everyday life:, “To this day, we recall Hans Hofmann’s theory of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ in abstract painting: our most creative professor [Dr. Housefield] instructed the class to grab a partner, press our hands together and work to push and pull our adjoining hands. This tactic helped to explain Hofmann’s dynamic painting surface, joined with empathy, and this association has remained with us years later.” The students said that Dr. Housefield’s methods were meant to be instructional as well as fun. “For example, he and other students helped to explain the strangeness of Picasso’s Cubist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by trying to place themselves in the models’ extremely awkward stances. He could analyze the Cubist’s approach by giving a visual demonstration of how things might or might not occur, and he emphasized a geographic structure to help explain the displacement and movement of art, styles, people, and political structures across space and time. This aspect comes specifically from his personal research into art and geography. It helps bring art to life as he introduces his relevant ideas into class discussions. His use of clips from recent television broadcasts, film, and music further reinforce this relevance and help to orient the view in a given time period.” The students also said they appreciated the several guest lecturers—artists and other art historians—who Dr. Housefield invited to give fresh points of view and broaden communication.

Dr. Housefield, the author of several publications including a forthcoming book tentatively titled Between the Arcades and Arcadia: Modern Art and the Visual Culture of Geography in Paris, 1851-1941, is arts editor of International Review of Modernism. A curator of the Austin Museum of Art, he is preparing an exhibition, "Radical New York: Abstract Expressionist Art from the Collections of the Grey Art Gallery, New York University” opening Nov. 18. He is also tentatively curating an exhibit on "Modern Art, Modern Lives" for Fall 2008 and another, "Sonic Visions: Contemporary Art & Music Intersect," for 2008 or 2009. Honors Program courses will give students the opportunity to see behind the scenes and contribute to the curating of these exhibits.

More information on Dr. Housefield’s NEH project is available by contacting him at jh48@txstate.edu.