Exploring Art and Social Practice in Huntsville
Published April 22 2025
By Morgan Page-Rice
Huntsville is a place with deep roots in Texas history that supports the arts through museums, art galleries, artist studios, and theaters in its cultural district. The city has a strong arts community with several nationally and internationally recognized artists teaching at Sam Houston State University [SHSU]. The piney woods of Huntsville is the home of the Master of Fine Arts program in Art and Social Practice at SHSU. Students need not look far for inspiration from daily life, their university community, and the stories of those walking amongst them.
Huntsville is no doubt a city brimming with fascinating points of departure for research and community-based art practices. The Texas State penitentiary is the largest employer there with 6,744 employees as of 2022. Since 1923, all executions within the state’s prison system have been carried out at the Huntsville Unit. ‘Hometown Prison’, a documentary about the town directed by SHSU alumnus and filmmaker Richard Linklater was released last year and sheds some light on the state’s history and politics in the context of Huntsville and the prison system. Huntsville also has a very rich and complex history as it relates to the Texas Revolution and Sam Houston, who served as the first and third president of the Republic of Texas, and made Huntsville his home. Sam Houston, SHSU’s namesake, was a slave owner who strongly opposed the Civil War and was a genuine loyalist to the Union; his position on the Civil War caused him to be forced out of office. The Sam Houston Memorial Museum and Republic of Texas Presidential Library preserves many historical documents related to that period.
A practicing artist choosing to live and work in a city that has amassed an unmistakenly sizeable amount of prison real estate, where citizens are asked to confront the reconciliation of daily life with mass incarceration can be a radical act. Sam Houston State University offers resources for artists desiring to connect their practice with their community by way of the MFA in Art and Social Practice program housed in the College of Arts & Media with support from SHSU’s Center for Community Engagement. The program began in 2021 under the direction of Professor and former Chair Michael Henderson and the art department faculty. Michael Henderson, now Associate Dean, had served as the college’s Academic Community Engagement [ACE] Coordinator and was heavily involved in community engagement prior to his role as department chair. Artist Jody Wood is the MFA Program Coordinator and an Assistant Professor in the art department. Jody’s work in social practice is internationally recognized and she describes her practice as “investigating the social dimensions of health and addresses entrenched societal issues using relational methods.” Her project ‘Beauty in Transition’ established a mobile hair salon providing beauty services that included hair wash, cut, color, and styling services in a calming recuperative salon environment for unhoused citizens in New York City, Denver, Philadelphia and Reading, PA, and Kingston, NY [https://www.jodywoodart.com/beauty-in-transition-1]. As I have spent time with each of the current students in the Art and Social Practice program, I have witnessed Jody’s optimism and informed introspection that she brings to each student’s individual projects and interests.
When asked to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of spearheading a community engaged art program in Huntsville, Jody began by praising the Huntsville community for not being resistant to her program and for institutions like Good Shepherd Mission and SAAFE House for making themselves accessible to the students. She says, “In fact, most organizations have been fine with the fact that working with the students is an open-ended experience.” Jody notes that after working in much larger cities, she’s had to recondition herself that apprehension on the part of public entities she or her students may want to engage is not a given in Huntsville. Students commit to embedded residencies for one year with a chosen interest or institution in mind, but some stay longer if their project expands within the residency. The MFA is a three year program and in their third year, they are developing a project with relevancy in a public space.
Glenda Pivaral was born in Santa Rosa, Guatemala and received her MFA from the Art and Social Practice program in the spring of 2024. Her project ‘Social Mending’ brings together recycled textiles and sewing supplies to approach the subject of overconsumption and self-exploitation. It is housed on a mobile cart and can be activated in public and private spaces. She teaches mending skills in exchange for participants’ stories and experiences with repair. She also provides to-go mending kits allowing them to continue the activity and conversations in their own lives. She says she is exploring “mending as it relates to social bonds and manual labor in order to raise questions about exploitation and bodily autonomy in an industrialized society.” In the image below, we see her in an exchange with a patron of the College Station Aggieland Farmer’s Market where she set up her mobile cart last spring.
Lilibeth Flores is a third year MFA student at SHSU that publishes a community newspaper with contributions from the patrons of Huntsville’s Bubbles Wash House Laundromat on Lake Road. Laundromats can be a singular place of introspection or a site of social gathering. Flores’s newspaper connects those experiences and provides community updates for repeat customers.
Jillian Hawk is an artist working in digital projection and augmented reality. Her work is often executed on the side of a building or important site. Hawk explores the grieving process and how it can transform bodies into relics and memory into veneration in the series Digital Reliquary. Below is an image from Digital Reliquary, Digital Graffiti Festival, Alys Beach, FL
Kanza Nasir studied textile design in Pakistan with an emphasis in design intervention. She has a history of working with artisans in rural areas and wanted to have an opportunity to engage her community as she pursued her MFA. She says working in Huntsville “pushes my limits as an artist and makes me question the mediums, my approaches and design strategies before making work.” She wants to ensure her work is impactful at every stage. She is currently bringing to life ‘Sangat Self-Service Kitchen’ where she hopes to encourage un-housed and under-resourced to utilize the space for cooking, resting, and participating in workshops. She hopes this will be a democratic space that provides an opportunity for groups from mixed socio-economic backgrounds and cultures to meet and engage each other in a healthy environment. ‘Sangat Self-Service Kitchen’ is still in progress, below is a timeline provided by the artist from the project’s conception last fall to its debut taking place in the spring of 2025.
Chelsea Jones is a first year MFA student that has a background as an educator but came to adopt social practice as an artist while working with Houston’s FotoFest. She is exploring dialog and collective movement. She is in the research stages of her project and is making maps and collages while being inspired by wayfinding based on community conversations, daily life, and interests. Her thesis project will explore how knowledge is transmitted through the built and unbuilt environment. Below is an image from a Literacy Through Photography workshop she taught for Fotofest in the summer of 2024.
Tony Rincon is a second year MFA student and has a background in photography. He enjoys establishing new connections in his community and providing opportunity for promoting the agency of others. Tony is a long time practitioner of Jujitsu. He has found methods for connecting the martial arts with communities that are underserved or even in recovery. He has recently connected a local theater with SAAFE House residents to provide a creative outlet for those recovering from sexual and domestic violence. Below is documentation from his project, ‘Conversations in the Park’.
In ‘Conversations in the Park’, park goers are invited to sit down with Tony and create a cyanotype. While the cyanotype is baking in the sun to produce an image, Tony asks questions about their relationship to technology and how it has affected their connections with others.
Each MFA student maintains a strong studio practice working in areas that include photography, sculpture, installation, painting, and drawing. They have access to all of the facilities in the Dana G. Hoyt art building, completed in Fall 2019. The majority of the students I spent time with were cross-disciplinary and included design as part of their overall process.
Additionally, MFA Program Coordinator Jody Wood works to identify professional opportunities for the students. SHSU’s MFA students collaborated with Masters students in strategic design at the New School in New York City. Students at the New School were participating in Michele Kahane’s CareLab, a research and innovation lab focused on building new practices and models of care and mutual aid in communities, organizations and cities. SHSU students visited New York City with Wood and showcased their work alongside the CareLab projects in spring of 2024. Four MFA students also presented with Jody at the Practice and Research Virtual Symposium hosted by Shetland College (UHI) in Shetland, UK in spring of 2024.
MFA students complete seminars with several faculty within the art department. Associate Professor Emily Peacock is a contributing faculty to the MFA program and the photography program at SHSU. She says, “Overall, the program offers an incredible balance of academic rigor, hands-on experience, and opportunities to engage with the local community and the broader world of art and social practice.” Associate Dean Michael Henderson maintains a strong relationship with the program meeting with students and serving on thesis committees. He says he hopes to see more funding for graduate assistantships and developing travel and study abroad opportunities for students in the program. Huntsville, Texas is an intriguing and provocative place to make art, especially by employing a studio practice where artists engage the public through tactical media and creative interventions. Art and Social Practice students are successfully bringing together aesthetics and cross-disciplinary skills that promote community care. Studio art and art history faculty are committed to creating an environment where challenging discourse and community resources support artists in a reimagining of their surroundings.