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“COLORS MAKE US DO VIBRANT DEEDS!” is a collaboration between the graphic designer M.H. Orfanos and the artist Heidi Howard. This limited edition book uses an innovative printing technique. The saturated ink illuminates the bright colors of Howard’s work. The translucent Opakal paper and handwritten notes emphasize the blending between Howard’s adventurous life and paintings. “COLORS MAKE US DO VIBRANT DEEDS!” was launched during an exhibition of paintings and monoprints by Howard at Columbia University’s LeRoy Neiman Gallery on the 27th of September (2024) in New York City and includes writing by Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Brenda Coultas, Natasha Marie Llorens, Veronika Sheer, Amy Giovanna Rinaldi and Heidi Howard.
Heidi Howard is an American artist born, raised, and currently based in Queens, New York. Howard paints portraits, whenever possible, with the sitter in the room. Their process and style changes with each sitter, reflecting images, energies, tastes and smells that emerge over the course of the painting. 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 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 Gallery “Portrait and Dream” was recognized by Kate Leibman in The Brooklyn Rail for its “use of pattern and color as a striking departure from the work of her contemporaries.” Nitin Mukul describes Howard’s recent exhibition “Light from Water: Heidi Howard and Esteban Cabeza de Baca with Liz Phillips” at Wave Hill “Heidi Howard is known for poetic installations and portraits that tend to dispense with binaries like figure and ground, interior and exterior, and seem rather to harness the shared exchanges and insights that took place in the process of working and interacting with live sitters. Howard’s interventions breathe life into parts of the building’s architecture that go beyond the exhibition walls.”
Howard has exhibited nationally and internationally, including, Wave Hill Garden and Cultural Center, Bronx, NY (2023), Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA and Cologne (2017, 2018, 2019, 2022), Rhode Island School of Design, Providence RI (2021), Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC (2020) Queens Museum (2018-2020) Continuo, Amsterdam (2019), W139, Amsterdam (2018), Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York, NY (2015, 2016, 2017), The Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clinton, NJ (2017), James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY (2016) and many more. Howard has been awarded artist residencies at Atlantic Center for the Arts (2021), Terra Summer Residency (2021), Rauschenberg Residency (2020), Carrizozo AIR (2019), Palazzo Monti (2018), and Byrdcliffe (2014). Their work has been discussed in Vogue Magazine, The New York Times, The Paris Review and The Brooklyn Rail, amongst other publications. “COLORS MAKE US DO VIBRANT DEEDS!” is Howard’s first monograph.
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