Barbara Houghton has been a professor in Visual Arts teaching photography and web design at Northern Kentucky University since 1992. She has been a working artist for over 40 years. She also taught photo, video and computer graphics for 18 years at Metro State College in Denver in Dept of Art before leaving to chair the Art Dept .at NKU. She holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Photography and BA from University of Illinois Chicago in Plastic and Graphic Arts (Fine Art).

Her most recent work is called Power & Protection. This artist book and the photographic prints examine my earliest views on my relationship with my religion. It tosses fun at the fact that children don’t understand symbolic language as adults might and rather irreverently challenges catholic doctrine, catechism classes, foibles of the priests and nuns in my childhood church.

Other bodies of her recent work was done while on sabbatical in India in cooperation with Self Employed Women’s Association in Gujarat where she photographed women helping women, and with the Guild of Service where she met Dr. V. Mohini Giri and made portraits of widows at the Ma Dham Shelter House in Vrindavan. She also photographed women in a small Muslim community in Jaipur celebrating the festival of Holi among other things.

Her work includes a large body of work about Galileo. A fascination with the man led her to do an installation of photographs with projected video called dancing with galileo. Some of the work in this group was shot in Arcetri in the house where Galileo lived under house arrest and died. This work was done with the help of then Professor of Astronomy, Franco Pacini of the University of Florence who gave her access to the house and from Dava Sobel, who allowed her to use quotes from her book Galileo’s Daughter. Both of these people encouraged her to do this work. The work broadly tells the story of Galileo as a man of conceit who fought with the Church over dogma but never gave up his observed beliefs. It is a love story in words and images.

As an artist, Barbara works every day in her studio doing something that has to do with making art. While most of the work is photographic, she employs installation and objects to complete telling a story in this mostly narrative work. The work is influenced by her travels abroad, her large family of 11 siblings from the working class, her interest in fate, chance and fortune, and how we got to be the people we are. She uses metaphor of instruments of navigations to talk about how we find our way in the journey of life. The work often harkens back to a personal narrative that looks for the humanity in us all and why we are connected.

She has shown work in local, regional, national and international venues. She has work in public and private collections. She has taken students to study abroad in such places as Ireland, England, Scotland, Australia, India, Italy, and Singapore. She travels often with her artist/jeweler husband and they have made many long-term friends internationally. She believes travel is not about the place but it is about the people and has made an effort to connect everywhere she is.

 

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