Heidi Howard '14 and Liz Phillips Bring 'Live Painting and Interactive Sound' to Roulette Next Week
Visual Arts alum Heidi Howard '14 will join interactive sound art pioneer Liz Phillips for Live Processing Paint and Sound, a live performance at Roulette on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, at 8 pm.
Co-presented by Harvestworks and Roulette as part of Harvestworks’ 50th anniversary celebration, the performance brings together painting, aquatic recordings, and live video. As Howard creates a painting, Phillips will live-process sound using Mugic and light sensors, contact microphones, and a theremin, transforming brushstrokes and fish activity into an immersive water soundscape.
The collaboration extends the art of painting into an environment of sound and moving images. While Howard will work with sensors and living painting, Phillips will perform with synthesizers and custom electronics. The live video synthesis created with six camera and screen feeds will illuminate Roulette’s large projection screen, expanding the visual experience as the painting develops.
Phillips and Howard, who are mother and daughter, have collaborated on similar performances and installations before. Their first, Relative Fields in a Garden, was a large-scale mural and sound installation at the Queens Museum (2018–2020) in which Howard documented her mother in their family garden. In a previous installation of Life Processing Paint and Sound at Fridman Gallery in 2022, Phillips "processed Howard's gestures while she painted Phillip's portrait: using Mari Kimura’s Mugic gesture interface, contact microphones, and hydrophones, to mix sounds of fish, water and shell textures," which was later refined and expanded in 2024 as Sound/Swim/Mirror at Dunkunstalle.
With this performance, Howard and Phillips will expand on previous collaborations, going from one live camera to six in order to capture different angles and perspectives of the gesture. For this performance, Howard will not paint representations of herself or Phillips, instead focusing on fish, citing Paul Klee's painting Fish Magic “and the form of a fish spine as points of inspiration combined with the memory of watching fish life cycles in Phillips's early installations.”
“This work explores my body and its impulses, its experiences of hydration, water and sound in an intimate way that only public improvisational performance can bring to painting,” Howard said.
The program will include an introduction by Interim Director of Harvestworks Ivana Dama, followed by a conversation with Sanna Almajedi, Performance Curator at e-flux.
Live Processing Paint and Sound takes place at Roulette on October 28 at 8 pm, with doors opening at 7 pm. A free livestream will be available at 8 pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.
Heidi Howard is a Queens, New York–based artist whose practice spans portrait painting, site-specific wall paintings, sculpture, and collaborative installations. Working across painting and spatial environments, Howard explores the relationship between people and their surroundings, often creating portraits with the sitter present. Their work has been exhibited at Wave Hill, Gaa Gallery, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the Queens Museum, W139, the Hunterdon Museum of Art, and James Cohan Gallery. Howard has participated in residencies including the Terra Summer Residency, Rauschenberg Residency, Carrizozo AIR, and Palazzo Monti. Their work has been featured in Vogue, The Paris Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. Howard’s first monograph, Colors Make Us Do Vibrant Deeds!, was published in conjunction with a solo exhibition at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University.
