Lowell Houser

Houser's family moved to Ames, IA, when he was seven and he graduated from Ames High School in 1921. In 1922, he enrolled at the Art Institute in Chicago. He went to Mexico and worked under the great mural artists of the day. In 1927, Houser was invited to join the Carnegie Institute's expedition to the ruins of Chichen-Itza in Yucatan under the direction of Sylvanus G. Morley. One of his jobs was making drawing of archaeological ruins. For two seasons, Houser assisted Anne Morris and Jean Charlot copying the frescoes from the Temple of the Warriors which were published in 1931. This exposure plus the influence of Meican muralists such as Diego Rivera formed Houser's style, as shown in his 1931 watercolor, Village Fountain, Haiti. Returning to Ames in 1931, he became involved in several W.P.A. art projects including assisting Grant Wood on murals for the library at Iowa State College, Ames, and creating a mural for the Ames Post Office: The Evolution of Corn, which is a composition dealing with the role of corn in the life of Mayans on one side and Iowa farmers on the other. Houser has the distinction of being the only person other than Grant Wood who designed part of the library mural. The other artists on the Project had talent for painting, Wood thought, but Houser had the ability to actually devise compositions, and Wood asked his help in working out the plans for the Engineering mural. Houser was living in Ames at the time and held a part time job in the Architectural Engineering Department at Iowa State College, so his proximity to "the source," as Wood termed it, led to Houser's brief period on the Project. Normally, no one who had a job of any kind would have been eligible for Project employment, but Wood made an exception because of his need for Houser's design abilities. The details of the Engineering mural such as the chemistry lab may have been supplied by Houser. Everett Jackson hired him to teach at San Diego State College in 1938. The following year he designed a mural for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco and had one of his prints accepted for the New York World's Fair. Returning to San Diego in 1944 to teach printmaking, Houser made several more trips to Mexico with Jackson and James Clark. Ill health forced him to retire in 1957 and he left San Diego, moving to his brother's plantation near Fredericksburg, VA. He built a studio there and made a final trip to Mexico in 1962.