Felice House

Associate Professor
Department of Visualization
College of Architecture

As a figurative painter, Felice House creates large-scale portraits to provide a counterpoint to the passive, overly sexualized female representations often found in art history and modern culture.

“Images of women have traditionally been created by men, for men,” says House, an assistant professor in the Department of Visualization in the College of Architecture. “My work is creating depictions of women redefined in the ‘female voice.’ Access to these kinds of images gives women, young and old, an opportunity to see themselves not as commodified objects of male desire, but as real people defining a new era of equality.”

In contrast to the traditions of Classical and Post-Renaissance Western Art, in which women are portrayed to extol physical beauty and to encourage possessiveness, House’s paintings represent women as accessible, positive, capable role models. House has sixteen years of experience creating art that relates to gender and power in culture. In the last three years, she has exhibited in thirty-five venues in the United States and Canada, including galleries, museums, universities, and publications.

She plans to use her Arts & Humanities Fellowship to produce two series of eight to twelve large-scale paintings. The paintings will be exhibited in peer-reviewed exhibitions at galleries, museums and universities around the country and internationally. The series will become integral to House’s presentations and papers at relevant conferences.

House earned her master of fine arts degree in painting from The University of Texas in 2011 and came to Texas A&M in 2012.