Alumna and Professor Heidi Howard '14 in Exhibition at Queens Museum
Visual Arts alumna and Adjunct Assistant Professor Heidi Howard '14 is in exhibition at the Queens Museum in New York until August 2019. On the occasion of the Queens International, a biennial exhibition highlighting the contemporary cultural production of Queens communities, Howard, and her mother Liz Phillips present their first artistic collaboration, Relative Fields in a Garden.
The Queens International: 2018 is entitled Volumes, referencing a collaboration with the Queens Library. Howard’s collaboration with Phillips is a part of the Museum’s Large-Wall series, featuring year-long commissions by women-identified artists.
The multimedia installation combines Howard’s vivid, gestural portraitures on a 40-foot wall in the Queens Museum with Phillip’s sound work, which creates interactive sound fields using wave transmissions. According to the Queens Museum, “The combination of image and sound includes fantastical flora and field recordings that bridge representation and abstraction, in a tender depiction of three generations of women and Phillips’ own Sunnyside, Queens garden as it transitions through the seasons. Mother and daughter collaborated on 3D elements such as ceramic flowers, bamboo, and birch veneer which animate the painting aurally as well as visually with tactile sound from Phillips’ transducers.”
Writing of her collaboration with her mother, Howard says when she imagines "Relative Fields in a Garden I think about maternal power, collaboration, how things mix, how things grow together. My belief that human existence is collaboration, that community is our most important resource…” In describing her overall work, she said, “I encounter images daily that reinforce a view of women as decorative objects, rather than powerful, thoughtful people. I am interested in painting the qualities of a person that go beyond a conventional visual pairing of figure and ground or the depiction of light upon a figure to render them in physical space.”
Howard (b.1986, New York, NY) has exhibited her work at Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY (2017, 2016, 2015) Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA and Cologne, Germany (2018, 2017), The Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ (2017), James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY (2016) and many more. She been an artist in residence at Palazzo Monti (2018), Byrdcliffe (2014) and the Vermont Studio Center (2011). She lives and works between Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Queens, New York.