Although his mother was a classical music and opera aficionado and wanted him to become a pianist, Mark Howard knew as a boy he was hardwired for a different art form.
“I’ve been drawing since I was three years old, and I had this insatiable demand for paper,” Mark recalls. “It got to the point where my mom had to go to local art supply stores and ask, ‘Please give me paper.’ I was more visually than musically inclined, and I knew I wanted to be an artist.”
Mark had grown up in Newark, New Jersey, thoroughly engaged by all of the cultural treasures of nearby New York, including world-class art museums and galleries and Broadway shows that his parents would take him to see and experience.
Because his high school did not employ art teachers, his mother enrolled him in children’s classes at The Newark Museum of Art. When he graduated, a friend who taught embroidery and textile arts at Montclair State College in New Jersey recommended that he check out the Cleveland Institute of Art. He enrolled in 1981.
While matriculating at CIA, Mark participated in several work/study programs where he learned how to hang an art show. After he graduated in 1986, he decided to remain in the city and took a job at The New Gallery, the predecessor to MOCA.
“I worked under Marjorie Talalay, and she gave me a strong background experience of how galleries run and how to conduct yourself professionally when you go into a gallery in the art world,” Mark says.
From there, Mark started exhibiting his work around Cleveland, and in 1988 he rented his first studio on the edges of AsiaTown. It was located only one block away from his studio today that he moved into in 1992. He realized the more affordable Cleveland was “a much better place where you can grow as an artist.”
Mark’s work has evolved since the 1980s from his early silkscreen imagery that was figurative with a pop sensibility. In the early ‘90s, he started doing paper cutouts and artwork based on paintings and creative imagery that was still figurative but displaying some abstract qualities. Mark also drew on subject matter from his neighborhood.
“I had this box I called the ‘Can of Shame,’ where I would keep photographs, letters and found pieces from people’s lives that I collected,” Mark says. “I would create artwork from it and turn it into paintings or sculptures.”
Those figures served as an early prototype for his pieces that were featured in the “Urban Evidence” show at the then Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art and were published in 1996. They evolved to “a whole different level,” he says, for the major Euclid Corridor project, where he designed 150 trash receptacles, tree grates and removable cast iron curbs that were used to cover electrical or water utilities along the street.
Mark’s three other favorite major projects include the stainless steel frieze with LED lights that he designed to flank the quarter mile of moving walkway in Concourse D at Hopkins International Airport; the murals he did for an entire room in the Cleveland Public Library – Louis Stokes Wing; and his first high-profile project as a young artist, the mural on the Cleveland School of the Arts in University Circle.
Moving into the 2000s, he started to become even more focused on the abstract quality of his work and the negative pieces that would drop from the cutout figures he was shaping.
“The figures started to become less and less important to what I wanted to construct visually,” he says. “Then, about five years ago, I stopped doing the figurative artwork and concentrated on the abstract qualities with the color, shape and form.”
“One of the things that distinguishes Mark as an artist is his persistence and consistent vision,” says Joan Perch, founder and executive Director, FireFish Arts, Lorain. “His amazing sense of color and the beautiful design style that he developed continues to emerge through his subject matter, and his keen curiosity about life and people has carried all the way through his work, with his unique vision.”
“Making art is like breathing, and I can’t imagine not doing it,” Mark says. “Just being able to produce artwork and have shows, that’s good enough for me. Hopefully, I will still develop as an artist in terms of subject matter.”
You can find Mark’s work at Hedge Art Gallery (hedgeartgallery.com).