Exchange place Portraits
YEAR: 2022
ARTIST: Heidi Howard
MATERIAL: Originally painted in acrylic on a canvas, digitally printed on vinyl by Five Boro Banner
More of the artists’ work can be found on Instagram @heidihoward or at www.heidihoward.net
Midori Yoshimoto
(Left Banner)
I paint my portraits in three to four hours. My marks are a reflection of conversations, smells, colors, tastes, vibrations and moments in time. Unlike most portraits made with paint or a camera, these do not rely on illusions of light bouncing off the body to reflect a figure. Rather, I choose colors and gestures as well as ideas of space to permeate the boundaries of the sitter’s silhouette. Each portrait is a new system, a shift in my painting practice that allows me to share space with the sitter. Sometimes I mark the canvas in preparation for the sitting; sometimes I alter the portrait afterwards, often listening to text or audio provided by the sitter. Through the process of making the portrait, I visualize a space where the sitter and I come to exist on canvas. The portrait is more than a moment in frozen time; it is a record of hours spent together.
Heidi Howard & Liz Philips
I came to this space, fortuitously called “Exchange Place”, with my mother Liz Philips. I brought with me stories of the location where my mother was born upside down (feet first) in a taxi, as well as stories of my grandfather’s office with its view of the Statue of Liberty. These fluctuated with memories of the skyline and my imaginings of what my ancestors first saw when they landed in this country. Liz Philips and I came to Jersey City to imagine another iteration of our 2018-2020 Queens Museum project, “Relative Fields in a Garden” that imaged the Sunnyside-garden of my mother and her family over the four seasons. I originally thought I would paint a family tree, but photographs of my relatives were scarce and my conception of home and space were forever changed by the pandemic. Instead, I came to focus on the part of my Jewish ancestry that I most cherish – our history as nomads able to adapt to new lands, new cultures, and to our practice of embracing questions and change. I now define my concept of home as a state of accepting complexity and as a space where people build community in spite of transience.
Korai Kitchen
When I grew up in Queens, it was the most culturally diverse place in the world. I was delighted to hear from Nur-E Gulshan Rahman that Jersey City is now in competitions, sometimes superseding Queens in that ranking. In this space, so permeated by water and human ambition, I wanted to paint some of the people providing nutrients to the environment and its people, literally and culturally. I painted Nur-E Gulshan Rahman and Nur-E Farhana Rahman – the amazing mother/daughter duo who run the delicious Korai Kitchen. I painted Midori Yoshimoto, who directs the New Jersey City University Art galleries and has a beautiful garden like her mother’s in Onomichi. She also often writes about postwar Japanese art and its global intersections, with a special focus on women artists and feminism. I painted Tatiana Smith, who is also a gardener and a doula, and started a community fridge that feeds about 600 people a week. It is a pleasure to bring my portraits off the wall, to let them be changed by intense wind, rain, day, and night light, and then to share them with passersby– new friends and potential allies.
Tatiana Smith
(Right Banner)
Heidi Howard employs portraiture to create new painted spaces. Often painted en plein-air, Howard’s portraits are a record of time spent with the person of heat, sound, and ideas. Howard was born and raised in New York City. Howard has painted many artists including Liz Collins, Chitra Ganesg, Judy Pfaff, Baseera Khan, Michelle Handelman, Curtis Roads, Sondra Perry, Paula Wilson, Aliza Nisenbaum, Susanna Coffey and Doron Langberg. In 2018, Howard created their first collaborative portrait and largest painting to date, a 40-foot by 100-foot all painting in the lobby of the Queens Museum of the artist’s mother, Liz Philips, entitled “Relative Fields in a Garden”. They have participated in artist residencies, including the Yonkers Artist Residency Program (2021), Atlantic Center for the Arts (2021), Terra Summer Residency (2021), the Rauschenberg Residency (2020), Carrizozo AIR (2019), Palazzo Monti (2018), and Brydcliffe (2014). Howard directed their first performance through an individual artist grant from the Queens Council on the Arts in 2019. Howard has presented their work at many venues including the Queens Museum (New York, 2018-2020), W139 (Amsterdam, 2018), Et-al Gallery (San Francisco, 2018), and Gaa Gallery (2018, 2017, 2016).