We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Heidi Howard. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Heidi below.

Hi Heidi, thanks for joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I learned to paint first by looking. I would walk from Sunnyside to the Metropolitan Museum and look at pastels by Edgar Degas. Most of the art I was making was in the margins of my notebooks. I was at a high school focused on math and science called Bronx Science. They had an AP art class, but the teacher was super tuned out. Nobody passed the AP test, but I got As on all my other APs, as did most of the other students. I taught myself how to make things look photographic by using a grid which is something I had learned how to do in Art Appreciation. You can copy almost anything that way. The first things I made were on paper. I considered them studies, learning the craft. I was lucky to be in New York City where I could see a lot of art, I was living in Queens and commuting to high school in the Bronx, so the Metropolitan Museum was a really good in between point to break up my commute. The whole city was my oyster. I wish I had known more about how to access contemporary art. Now I go to openings all the time. It’s part of my business. Back then, I didn’t know how to go to openings. Ironically, I loved partying then. Now going out can seem like a chore. I realized I wanted to be an artist when I started at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. My parents are sound artists, and they had told me that art wasn’t a way to make a living and pushed me to do something more practical. When I went to college, I realized I was going to have to work hard to be successful at whatever I did and what I wanted to do was make paintings, maybe teach painting. I still love teaching. I have no problem with education being a big component of how I make my living. I transferred from Reed to go to school for a year in Italy. I had visited Florence and Venice on a high school trip, and I needed to live there. I have been fascinated with Botticelli’s Primavera and many aspects of Italian culture since childhood. Reed didn’t have a study abroad program in Italy, so I found some programs by searching online. I spent one semester at Instituto Lorenzo de Medici in Florence and started learning to paint in watercolor and tempera with Marsha Steinberg who in the final critique said in front of everyone that she didn’t know what I was studying but I needed to be an artist; it was very clear that I loved art from how much time I was spending on my work and that I was very talented and that whoever had told me that art wasn’t what I should be doing was wrong. That advice was the validation I needed, accompanied by practical things Steinberg did like bringing her art dealer to our class and telling us how she had created her career. The next semester I studied in Venice at Scuola Internazionale di Grafica and most of the students were from Boston University where they have a strong painting program. I was lucky to learn how to use oil paint for the first time alongside those students who had already had at least two years of experience with oil paint. In many ways being an artist is something you learn from your peers because art is new. It’s supposed to be something different than what’s been done before so in terms of craft there’s things teachers can teach you about painting, great methods for being more observant and learning different techniques. Real art happens in new spaces though, when you are working with craft and something exciting and unexpected happens. Teachers can also show you how to live life as an artist and I have many former teachers, who I now think of as peers or colleagues. We are all navigating a complicated landscape in this new millennium. As an artist I constantly reevaluate my place in the culture and my path will not be the same as the paths of my teachers, we must recalibrate together. I ended up finishing my last two years of college at Sarah Lawrence where I studied oil painting with Leah Montalto, acrylic painting with Ursula Schneider and sculpture with Tishan Hsu. I got involved in the New York art scene through an internship at the Brooklyn Rail in my final semester at Sarah Lawrence. At the Rail, I got to hang out with people who were successful in the art world and to be involved in writing about, and historicizing art. Artists at the Rail treated me like a peer and I got to have discussions late into the night with other people whose passion is making change in our culture. Then in 2012, I went to Graduate School at Columbia and that was where I cemented the lifelong friendships with painters like Victoria Roth, Esteban Cabeza de Baca and Anna Glantz that really carry me through today. Gregory Amenoff, the head of the painting department, is someone who really loves painting, loves talking about painting, historical painting, contemporary painting, and we had a great group of artists who were at school 12 hours a day working, talking about ideas, and that experience taught me how to be an artist. Dana Schutz was one of my mentors at Columbia. They have a mentorship program where you get to spend a week with an artist. Dana took us to sleep over at her house upstate, to her studio, to the gallery she was showing with then, Petzel Gallery. There were four weeks in total in the two years of Graduate School. Dana started each of those weeks by talking about problems that we thought were important in painting and we would make a big list of who could be interesting to talk to and Dana would arrange visits. We were supposed to put together a book of all the work from our mentor group at the end of school which never ended up being published but I still have a lot of notes from those weeks. Like at that time narrative was like a dirty word in painting and I remember sending Dana a list of all the people I thought were doing interesting paintings with narrative. Now it’s almost hilarious because half the people in art school, if not more, want to be figurative narrative painters. So, at Columbia I felt at the center of the “industry” of painting and I learned how to be part of a discussion amongst peers about what was important in painting. To me it’s not just a craft, it’s an active industry, with constant new information and materials.

Heidi, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My art practice stems from making portraits that I make when people are sitting in my studio for three hours. We both put away our cell phones and we talk, focus on each other. My practice stems from those portraits but it also stems from my community. I find artists such inspiring subjects for conversation and creating new paintings. Artists have been my main subjects for the past 15 years. Recently I’ve wanted to paint other people in the community like gardeners, scientists, architects, and poets. I also love working on larger projects, one might call installations. Since 2018, I’ve been making installations about our bodies’ relationship to our environment. My paintings were already kind of about the complexity of a body’s relationship to the environment. I started wanting to paint portraits in 2004. I was reading Edith Wharton’s book the House of Mirth and thinking about how as someone in a young femme presenting body people were pressuring me to be a decoration in each space I entered just like this young protagonist Lily Bart. In the book Lily Bart pressed in her life to be a decorative accoutrement to a man because that was the way she could make a life in society at the time. I was like wow it’s 100 years since this book’s publication; I was getting close to the age that Lily Bart was in the book then and the ways that we think about gender family dynamics and capital is not as evolved as it should be. Wharton’s book is beautiful because it complicates the body’s relationship to decoration, one of the stories main attractions is its detailed descriptions of rooms, costumes and architecture and how those elements outside our bodies interact with our personalities. I love decoration. I love Henri Matisse and Claude Monet who extensively discussed their “grandes décorations” and are considered great artists. I think a lot about Florine Stettheimer’s work and her complicated role as a painter and community organizer in the art world. Marcel Duchamp organized her retrospective at MoMA, yet somehow her name disappeared for almost 50 years. Her work is always discussed as if she was an outlier, rather than a fundamental actor in New York’s art story. I’m very passionate about being part of a community of strong femme, non-binary artists who are making a difference as cultural producers. I have always been interested in decorating things and how visual pleasures interact in our life. My paintings are full of things I love, so that means a lot of color and pattern. When I moved away from New York City to live in Amsterdam in 2017, I became much more aware of the objects I surrounded myself with. I moved with two suitcases. The aesthetics of the Amsterdam art world were very different than New York City. Most artists wore black and made sparse installations to be shown against white walls. It became clear to me how important New York’s art world filled with colorful passionate painters is to my practice. I also missed my parents, and I started working on a project with my mother, Liz Phillips, that became my first large public collaboration, “Relative Fields in a Garden.” I painted a 40 foot high by 100 foot long improvisational mural in the lobby of the Queens Museum, listening to sounds my mother recorded in our garden over the course of the year. When I finished painting these sounds were played back through transducers on 22 speaker objects, we designed for the installation. The sounds were always changing according to a light sensor processing through a Serge synthesizer. I organized my first performance with this project. It was the start of a series of painting installations about our bodies relationship to their environment. That work inspired me to do more installations and public projects. I try to do one or two a year, in addition to my portable paintings.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

I think the best way for society to support artists is to be involved in the art community so maybe that means going to your local museum or reading a book about artists or watching documentaries. Everyone can’t engage in art at the same level. Like, sometimes people want to know all my experience as an artist. They feel like they need to know everything in order to really see art or to have an opinion. Having taught introductory college art courses for many years, I know that there’s some basic knowledge about how to read images, about how to talk about things we see, that everyone should get a chance to learn. It should be taught in high school. These are basic things that I teach in beginning painting classes and beginning art history classes about color and form and art history. We’re all seeing hundreds of images every day. Too many images for our brains to process. Looking at paintings is very important for everyone—just going to the museum and looking at one still image and thinking about the process of how the artist made this thing is a really useful exercise for anyone to do, thinking about like how and why someone spent their time moving their hand across a canvas creating an image or looking at a photograph and thinking about how a human created an image that way. People can support artists by having confidence in their own ideas about visual information. You might be shocked at how many people I know that aren’t artists that have the most brilliant ideas about the art world and art that they’re seeing. The art world desperately needs that kind of active engagement from viewers. Many institutions can make it seem like they’re trying to make things more accessible and invite people in, but I know that people often still don’t feel welcome in museums and so I invite you as the public to engage with artists. There are many ways you can support artists. For example, I just made my first book “Colors make us do vibrant deeds!” with Phoebe Press. Purchasing a book is a great way to support my practice, not only monetarily, but by reading the book and discussing the ideas and the paintings in its pages with people. I was so excited about this three year collaboration with the designer and publisher, Mikel Orfanos, because it’s my first easily reproducible and transportable work. I think a lot of artists are also interested in having their work in people’s homes and in public spaces. I certainly am. I advise reading and watching and thinking, and then, approaching artists you know to learn more about their practice. Maybe it’s not such an immediate transaction as you buy a work for your home, maybe it’s just like you get to know the artist and you have intelligent things to say about their work. Having friends who are supportive and affirm my ideas and engage with what I’m thinking about in the cultural community is often more important than monetary support and can also lead to an artist’s work coming into your home or community space in an unexpected way. People often think art is overpriced. They don’t really consider things like the price of having a studio in New York, the price of having a home in New York, which is where I need to be to make my work. I encourage people to think about what their budget could be in terms of purchasing an artwork. I know so many people who are successful young professionals who wouldn’t blink at spending $500 on a night out or $2,500 on a short vacation but would not want to put that same budget into purchasing a priceless cultural marker for their home. We need the voices of younger professional people in the art community, so I encourage people to try to be more engaged through their wallets, if they have an expendable income, but also through their minds and through a combination of these resources.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

How to love without fear is something I had to learn by unlearning some aesthetic lessons from mentors. Being part of the art community is also being part of a discussion about what kinds of art should be revered and preserved. It is important when you are younger to listen to people who are authorities. I learned to listen to authority at a young age, to people who had institutional accreditation. As I spent more time in the art world, I encountered more people with various opinions and found more people who saw things in a similar way to how I saw them. One example is that there were almost no women artists discussed in the New York School of painting when I finished college, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Agnes Martin and Joan Mitchell were all names I knew but they weren’t key figures. Now they are all a part of my story of art, though certainly not everyone’s. I remember loving Elizabeth Peyton’s show at the New Museum, and one of my mentors at the time telling me it was just put on because she was friends with board members and how no one would know her name in ten years. Years later, this same mentor is a champion of Peyton’s work. In general, in 2008, telling people that you painted portraits was basically equated with being a Sunday painter. I recently had an art dealer visit my studio who told me Alice Neel’s work was not great painting and that Neel would never have a strong place in art history or the market because her paintings are too difficult. To make paintings that matter you must take a stand about what you think is important, and that will mean unlearning some aesthetic lessons that you learned from people you respect. I am very disappointed in this country right now. I want the United States to be a leader in sustainable living, in demilitarization, in rights for all humans to life, liberty and justice. I think this change can only come through disagreement, through conversation and through argument. I was recently at a talk where Alex Katz and Robert Storr got into an argument about what constitutes great painting and it was magnificent to see this conversation, because passionate debate is so unusual these days. Often in the art world people are too polite to take a stance even on their aesthetic preferences, and this must change. I believe one of the greatest powers of art is its ability to foster creative debate. Social media has completely changed our cultural landscape. Spaces for nuanced thoughtful debate are few and far between. In graduate school I was making paintings about Facebook and Instagram and most of the teachers who visited my studio told me that this work was irrelevant, and that Instagram was a passing fad. They were much more interested in talking about the world they were involved in. I stopped making that work and looking back I see that I had a lens into something my teachers were missing. Now my work has gone in a completely different direction. It’s hard when you are young because the paths you choose are very consequential, but you don’t have as much experience to look back on. Now I know much more about how to trust my gut, but I feel the world less. I don’t have the same fresh big perspective. As I’ve gotten older my mind is much more occupied with practical things like bills and health, but I also have the resource of much life experience. I’ve been thinking about how much time I spend on my phone. How I feel like I don’t have time, how my friends tell me they don’t have time. The time of talking while I make the portrait has become precious in a different way than it used to be. It used to be normal to sit and talk for hours. Now people start to tick after an hour of not having checked their phone. I feel a constant group impulse to react to things that are happening all over the world at all hours of the day. People at openings are seeing, documenting, posting. I am thinking about how to create more measured space, to be part of a slower community.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.heidihoward.net
• Instagram: @heidihoward
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61556254942471