Self Scarf Spots Print

Heidi Howard (born 1986) is an American painter born, raised, and currently based in Queens, New York. They received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MFA from Columbia University. Howards makes portraits; they paint, whenever possible, with the sitter in the room. Their process and style changes with each person, reflecting the color feelings of both Howard and the sitter, their shared aesthetics, and images that emerge over the course of the sitting. Megan Garwood described Howard's first solo exhibition “Painting for Love” (2008) as a group of portraits that "echo the intimate style of Elizabeth Peyton, rendering the personalities of Howard’s subjects. However, unlike the most-recognizable motif in Peyton’s work, a close depiction of the face, Howard juxtaposes her (sic) subject against a Matisse-pattern smoothly applied with a color palette that could have been mixed by David Hockney, himself." Howard's first exhibition at Nancy Margolis "Portrait and Dream" was noticed by Kate Leibman in The Brooklyn Rail for its “use of pattern and color as a striking departure from the work of her contemporaries.” In 2018, Howard painted a 40 foot high by 100 foot long portrait of their mother Liz Phillips in the atrium of the Queens Museum. This installation, titled “Relative Fields in a Garden”, combined Howard's painting about their family and their garden with Phillip's field recordings of the garden over the four seasons. In 2019, Howard organized their first performance “Relative Fields in Motion”, through an Individual Artist Grant from the Queens Council on the Arts, extending Howard and Phillips' exploration of the politics of relation and simultaneity found in the domestic sphere of the garden, further activating their work's synesthetic interplay of sound, image, and movement. Recent projects include other performances with Liz Phillips “Sea Gestures: Sound Swim” (2022) and Sound Swim Mirror (2023) where live painting and processing of water sounds are activated by aquatic and human movement, “Vaccination Stories” (2022) for Epicenter NYC, “Exchange Place Portraits” (2022) for Exchange Place Alliance and “Nature Remembers Love”(2022) for Meta Open Arts. In 2023 Howard completed the exhibition “Light from Water: Heidi Howard and Esteban Cabeza de Baca with Liz Phillips at Wave Hill Garden and Cultural Center.