Abstract

Artist Mark Howard discusses his personal background and career, including his family and art education. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Howard realized he had artistic abilities as a young child. With early encouragement from his mother, Howard pursued his interests in drawing and had an "insatiable" demand for paper and art supplies. Although his early education did not provide arts programs, his teachers continued to encourage his abilities. Howard moved to Cleveland in 1981 and enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art. While taking classes, several artists including Julian Stanczak, Wanda von Weise and Ed Mieczkowski influenced Howard. After graduating in 1986, Howard decided to remain in Cleveland. He created artwork using several media including painting, silkscreens, and paper cutouts. Much of Howard's work maintained a Black sensibility and urban theme, using life in the streets as his primary influence. Recently, Howard designed public art for Cleveland's Euclid Corridor Transportation Project. Howard's public art includes tree grates featuring textile designs of Native American wampum belts and decorative trash cans using laser-cut steel to create symbols that "make no sense" since Euclid Avenue is supposed to be a "smart street."

Loading...

Media is loading
 

Interviewee

Howard, Mark (interviewee)

Interviewer

Busta, William (interviewer)

Project

Cleveland Artists Foundation

Date

10-28-2008

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

61 minutes

Transcript

William Busta [00:00:00] Compare responses to them. But I’ll also, though I have a certain pattern here. It doesn’t really matter which pattern I ask the questions in. And we’ll go- We’ll find whatever. If you find yourself going in a certain direction, we’ll follow that, and that’s fine. I encourage people that I talk to- If I ask the wrong question, answer the question I should have asked rather than what I said. Because the purpose of this is to create a record of what your perceptions, some of the ways- I guess another way to say it is that if somebody comes across your artwork in 50 years and they’ll say, who is this guy? In all probability, you’ll be able to go- So that person will be able to go on the Internet and come up with this, come up with this interview. Because it will be- You know, in the old days, you did oral histories, and you put them on cassette tapes, and you put them in little plastic packages and put them in boxes, put those in bigger boxes, and then they got put in the back of the closet. But these are actually going to be a living archive at Cleveland State University. The people that will be able to access- And through the years, there’ll be different people who will write about your work. But this is one of your opportunities to have your own voice about what your art means and stuff. As we go through and as you talk about artwork, it would be helpful if you’d make some effort to actually physically describe it. Although I guess at some point, associated in a web file, there may be images of your work that there’s also people who are going to listen to it who don’t see the work. So it helps to. Well, I did this, and I used green, or I cut this out of this. And this is so big. Or to give some sort of sense of that. And I guess that’s about it. Would like to spend up to an hour sort of doing this. And it actually, as I said, it can, other than this set of questions, which I’ll get back to at some time, can take any direction you want to take and set any priority on it that you want, that you want to set.

Mark Howard [00:02:25] Okay.

William Busta [00:02:26] And I’m desperately trying- I’ll not, try not to cough too much. So I’ve been sort of successful up to this point. It’s an allergy, not a cold. So.

Mark Howard [00:02:36] Okay. All right.

William Busta [00:02:37] Okay.

Mark Howard [00:02:38] With this Typhoid Mary now.

William Busta [00:02:45] Okay, we’re ready to start. Could you talk a little bit so that Erin gets a sense of your volume?

Mark Howard [00:02:52] Yeah.

Erin Bell [00:02:53] And also before we just like to tell people, you know, ruffling papers and tapping on the table will show up really loud.

Mark Howard [00:03:04] Okay, can you hear me now? Is that, is that a good volume level?

Erin Bell [00:03:08] Yeah, I think, I think we’re good.

Mark Howard [00:03:10] Okay.

William Busta [00:03:15] And let’s start. What is, what is your name and where, where were you born?

Mark Howard [00:03:21] My name is Mark Elliot Howard and I was born in Newark, New Jersey.

William Busta [00:03:28] And did you grow up there or how did, how, how did you come to northern Ohio?

Mark Howard [00:03:33] Well, I grew up in New Jersey. I actually grew up in New Jersey, but spent a lot of years in other cities. So basically I was born on the east coast but was raised in the Midwest in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, Milwaukee, Plymouth, Michigan. But I came to Cleveland around 1981 to attend Cleveland Institute of Art.

William Busta [00:04:11] Your family move around a lot?

Mark Howard [00:04:14] No, actually I was the one who moved around a lot. I stayed half of my life with an aunt and uncle who were in the airline industry. He was a pilot and she was one of the first airline stewardesses. They were both in the Air Force, so I would spend half of the year with them during the summertime. And so they lived in Hoffman Estates and then they moved. He got a promotion and moved to Plymouth, and I just followed them. And so I sort of grew up on both sides.

William Busta [00:04:58] When did you first realize that you had artistic ability?

Mark Howard [00:05:05] Probably around age 3, because my mother wanted me to be a concert pianist. And she sat me down and said, Mark, do you want to learn how to play the piano? And I looked at her and I said, no, I wanted to draw. So she didn’t argue with that. She thought that, well, it’s going to be in the art, so let’s just leave it at that. And she just supplied me with paper and paper and pens and pens. And then it became an almost, you know, insatiable, you know, demand. She kept finally, you know, calling art supply stores is that I need more paper, I need more paper, because I don’t know where to get more paper. So that’s when I first knew, and I always knew I wanted to be an artist. So it really wasn’t any second-guessing.

William Busta [00:06:11] Did that come from anywhere or did you just find yourself drawing?

Mark Howard [00:06:15] I just found myself drawing. Came from somewhere, but I just found myself drawing.

William Busta [00:06:24] Were there any people who, as you were a child that you looked up to, that you saw were artists that helped you model your idea of what an artist was?

Mark Howard [00:06:37] I had no role models in the arts, in family or in school, everything was self-taught. The only backing inspiration was really from my mother, who was not an artist herself, but she was a really avid symphony goer during the 1940s and ’50s, and she would attend the symphony and she would take me to museums. So she supported, supported me and also showed me what being an artist and what that involved, no matter what the disciplines. She used to take me to see Nureyev when he was in New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s, or, you know, Placido Domingo. And so no matter what, you know, artists, what medium they were performing, she, you know, instilled into me in terms of what disciplines you needed. 

William Busta [00:08:00] Where did your mother’s interest come from? Do you know?

Mark Howard [00:08:03] She was just always interested in Classical 

William Busta [00:08:07] Was she a musician? 

Mark Howard [00:08:08] No, a nurse.

William Busta [00:08:12] As, as you went through school, were there any, you know, up to the time you went to the Cleveland Institute of Art, were there any teachers in junior high or high school that helped you in your growth or encouraged you?

Mark Howard [00:08:29] When I was in grammar school, I went to, mostly I went to really Catholic education all my life. And in New Jersey it was Blessed Sacrament School. And we had a music teacher, Sister Maria Raffaello, and she would have me design stage sets for school plays or a little earlier, probably when I was in, like second or third grade, some of the nuns would like kidnap me after class and say, I want you to decorate the room for me so that, you know, so I did that. And so they sort of encouraged me to, you know, keep at it. They didn’t know exactly where it was going to go, but they, you know, they knew, you know, that I loved the draw.

William Busta [00:09:29] And when you were in high school, did you know from the beginning you started thinking about college, that it was going to be an art school?

Mark Howard [00:09:38] Yes, I knew it was going to be an art school. In high school it was a little different because it was a smaller school in Summit, New Jersey, Oratory Prep. It was an all boys’ school, and it had no arts program whatsoever. No music, no painting, nothing. It was literature, history, calculus, all those. And so I really had to learn it all by myself. But I did have several teachers who were very much into the arts. One was a math teacher, Father Manning, who taught French classes and would invite me to go with the French Club to Manhattan, even though I didn’t take his French classes, to see a Rouault show and to see theater shows in Manhattan. And I also had other instructors in that high school who would take me to see the Met in Manhattan or the Guggenheim or see some off-Broadway shows. So they saw something that they wanted to encourage, but I really did not have any instructors. There’s everything I had to learn on myself, on my own time.

William Busta [00:11:14] There wasn’t the enrichment class at the art museum?

Mark Howard [00:11:17] No, no. The only thing I remembered, I would go to the museum on my own accord, the Newark Museum. It wasn’t far from me, and usually I was there about two to three times a week, sometimes after school, and just researching and researching and taking books out and just learning a lot about art history, specifically at that stage, probably medieval and Asian art and Persian manuscripts from what I remember at that time. So it was- There really wasn’t a lot of- They didn’t have a lot of the programs at that museum that we have here. It’s a smaller museum. It’s a very nice collection. It has the best collection of Tibetan art and has a very strong early modernism. So I saw a lot of early modernist work that I really had never seen on that scale until I got to Cleveland.

William Busta [00:12:40] And in the Newark community - you continued, obviously, going there through high school - how did you choose to go to the Cleveland Institute of Art? What was that attracted you here?

Mark Howard [00:12:58] Well, I believe I applied to, like, five schools. You know, there’s always the, you know, the Meccas, Pratt, and Parsons, and I remember applying to those, and Philadelphia College of Art, and then Cleveland Institute of Art. I really didn’t know too much about the Cleveland Institute of Art until a friend of mine, his mother’s friend, taught at Montclair State College in the art department. I believe it was paper making. And she was a graduate of the Institute in the ’50s. And so she was just going on and on and on about the Institute. You have to go and make a visit to the campus. And so I thought, okay. So first we went to my mother and I drove to Philly, and I saw the campuses, and I thought, hmm. So then we came to Cleveland, saw the campuses, and I thought, wow. Said, I want to stay here. So that’s how I ended up here.

William Busta [00:14:26] As you were a student at the Cleveland Institute of Art, were there any teachers that particularly influenced you?

Mark Howard [00:14:35] Yeah, there were. Julian Stanczak was one, Wenda von Weiss, and it’d probably be Ed Mieczkowski. Those were the three that I believe influenced me the most.

William Busta [00:15:12] And did you always. I mean, you graduated from the institute in the mid-’80s. Did you expect them to stay in Cleveland, or- You said you came here in 8’1, so I assume you graduated about ’86?

Mark Howard [00:15:28] Yes, I graduated in ’86.

William Busta [00:15:31] Did you just expect to stay in Cleveland, or is it that you knew people here or you pretty much have made your career in this location?

Mark Howard [00:15:40] Yeah, I didn’t really know what I was going to do in 1986. You know, everyone from the previous class were either going to New York or going somewhere, and then you never heard from them again. And being from Newark, New Jersey, I’m only 12 miles away from Manhattan, so in some weird sense, that was a little too close to home. So. And I knew that I didn’t want to go to New York and be with 12 other artists in some little hole and working 20 hours a day and not having time to do your artwork, just struggling just to live. So I decided, I’ll just try it here. And I found my first studio here, and I’ve stayed ever since.

William Busta [00:16:43] When you graduated from the Institute, the first work I remember of yours was fairly large-scale canvases with silkscreen silk images. Did you take them as photographs and then enlarge them or what was your working technique at the time?

Mark Howard [00:17:05] It was a little bit of both. Initially, I was dealing with found photographs and newspaper imagery and then cropping them and changing the content, almost not even really looking at what the text was underneath it. I refused to look at the text. It was just the immediacy, the power of the image. And then I would either change it through scale and color or crop it and alter it and put it with other found imagery. And then later, when I was in Wenda von Weiss’s classes and getting more involved into textile design, I said, well, you should take more of your pictures. So then I would start going around and taking photographs of people or going to nightclubs and photographing whole rooms and taking those images and then blowing those up and silkscreening them.

William Busta [00:18:25] And those canvases got pretty big with Cleveland Studio. Those canvases got pretty big.

Mark Howard [00:18:30] They were huge. Those canvases were- Some of those canvases were 7 feet high. And it took two people to pull the squeegee. And so usually I was only the only one in the- Well, back then it was the textile department because that’s where I did my paintings. And there was usually no one in there at the time. So I would just go up and down the halls and grab somebody and say, have you ever pulled a silk screen before? And then we’d go back in the other room and I’d say, okay, you do this. And when I count to three, one, two, three. And they were huge. They didn’t start really that big, but then the content and everything kept saying bigger and bigger and bigger. And it got to such a degree that they were 7 feet tall. Silk screens and, you know, sometimes I had to take them to a print shop and actually have the machine print them. And that was fun. That was fun. I liked that a lot.

William Busta [00:19:45] Wenda was doing a lot of photo transfers onto fabric. Did she do silk screens as well?

Mark Howard [00:19:51] Yes, she taught us how to do silkscreen repeats. And I’ve always been interested in fabric design and that’s where I got my training to learn how to do a repeat imagery and repetition was through her. And she would break it down into the mathematics for you and how to break an image into quadrants and then, and do copy of it and another copy and another copy and then until you get the final result. And it’s always been an interest in that.

William Busta [00:20:39] That’s interesting to me that you’re talking about this coming from the tradition of fabric design rather than, let’s say from someone like Andy Warhol, who was. Who had done similar, not similar things, but had certainly done silk screen on canvas a couple decades earlier. But that’s where I guess silkscreening had always been taught by the fabric department rather than by the printmaker.

Mark Howard [00:21:07] Right. It was always considered like the bastard child of printmaking. And so the printmaking departments wouldn’t touch it, but the textile departments would because it was a viable means of making the actual product. That’s how the factories made them. And it really was a hands on experience. And that’s where I did my paintings. I had a studio in the factory, but I also had almost like another studio, like a satellite studio in the textile department. So I got sort of these, almost like a cross pollination between the two departments. I was a painting major, but yet doing the paintings in the textile department and getting all these feedbacks from a text or fiber point of view that you normally wouldn’t get in a painting department.

William Busta [00:22:18] What was, how important was the content of the pieces compared to, let’s say, the formal aesthetics of the piece, which, as I know, as your work certainly progressed, content begins increasingly important. But did it start out that way?

Mark Howard [00:22:41] No, it was for the most part really formalist in terms of color combinations. In some ways it was almost kind of a dual thing, because with a silkscreen you can establish a content and then fix it and then forget about it and then change the colors and then have the colors then become more of a formalistic approach. So, you know, you could have something that looks very horrific or, you know, or looks disturbing and then change the colors and it completely alters it. But yes, I think it probably did start out with just strictly formless thing. And just learning about color theory and what you want to achieve from placing this color next to another color.

William Busta [00:23:46] Well, I know that when you graduated from the Institute of Art, almost immediately you were getting a lot of attention for the pieces. I remember one of your images on the cover of Dialogue?

Mark Howard [00:24:00] The red- The Pause That Refreshes. That’s what I named it. And I took it from two sources. The dew from a soda can and two protesters from then South Africa. This is probably when they still were going through the last stages of Apartheid. So I combined, like, this soda pop commercialism with protest. And that was a very. I remember that was a very difficult pattern to repeat. And when I finally solved it, I decided to make it red. And red will- You know, you think red and you think cool because red makes you thirsty. So you think cool. And so it’s funny you remember that one. Now I remember it, but that’s what I was thinking of at the time.

William Busta [00:25:18] Well, I remember that it wasn’t that long after that point you had a studio in Cleveland doing very large pieces that you stopped doing the silkscreen paintings. Why was that?

Mark Howard [00:25:33] It ran its course. I had said what I really wanted to say with all of it, and it was time to move on. And sort of like at an interim stage, I was doing black and white ink sketches and washes and sketchbooks. And then for some reason, that evolved into paper cutouts and how that is kind of like I was working in a silkscreen shop at the time. So I was sort of also learning about, you know, I was seeing silkscreen smelling like silkscreens, and I was just getting tired of it. And I remember seeing a stack of paper, and they were going to throw it out. So I thought, well, don’t throw it out. I can use it for something. And it was thin enough to fold. And so for some reason, I just started folding it and sketching on it with the black ink. And then I guess I just started cutting. So it wasn’t anything that I really planned, but I decided that ending the silk, I was just. It was repeating itself, and I didn’t want to have that happen. It was time to move on.

William Busta [00:27:10] But there is- There is between the- Between the silkscreen work that you were doing and the cutouts. There is that. There is a- Some- Let’s use the word repeating. There’s the repeating of pattern in both of them and the way the patterns knit together.

Mark Howard [00:27:29] Yeah, yeah. That’s in my blood. I can’t get rid of that. That’s part of the textile influence, probably from the Medieval influences and the Persian manuscripts, those intricate border. The whole idea of a page as a carpet idea. Those things, I think, are kind of cyclical for me. You know, I’m always fascinated by pattern. So I just can’t seem to. I can’t drop everything, apparently.

William Busta [00:28:10] And were the cutouts ever intended to be works of art by themselves, or did you always see them as preparation for paintings?

Mark Howard [00:28:22] The cutouts were the drawings. They were- I thought of them as drawings, as complete drawings. Whereas people would draw with a pencil, I would draw with an X-Acto knife. Once I got to that black and white stage, then I wanted to see them on a bigger scale. And then that led to the painting.

William Busta [00:28:53] Sizes and the paint. Did changes take place when you did the painting? Or was it pretty much were you following the sketch fairly closely? And how careful was that? How careful was that? Did the cut up become the study for the painting?

Mark Howard [00:29:15] Well, initially I wanted the- I wanted the cutout. I wanted the painting, the sketching of the cutout onto the canvas, to be exact. I didn’t want any interruptions or distractions. I just wanted a clear, simple blow up on that canvas. And from there I just wanted to see where the image would really take itself. Sometimes I would follow exactly, and then other times I wouldn’t. I would almost go a little bit more freehand with the brushwork and the coloration. So it really depended on the image, really.

William Busta [00:30:21] How we’re talking, of course, a period of about 10 years where the transition was made from when you were in school to having a lot of paintings fairly well known that were based on the cutouts. And how did your subject matter change during that period of time?

Mark Howard [00:30:47] It went through various stages. The silkscreen stages were more probably, I would say, almost like a post-pop that had a Black sensibility to it. That then evolved into the paper cutouts. The paper cutouts initially kept an urban theme to it, but I think it was more localized. It dealt with what was immediately around me in the neighborhoods and where my studio was and what I found on the street in terms of letters or photographs. And I would use those as inspiration and content. Rather than previously going through a newspaper or whatever. This finding of imagery was more intimate. It then went on, and the subject matter then changed even more. And then it became more of a homoerotic content in probably around ’91 or ’92. And then it flipped back to religious content. You know, there were sort of themes that have always been going around in my work. I guess it just at various stages of my life, certain ones come forward and others recede.

William Busta [00:33:12] And in recent years, the work has- When did you first sort of turn the cutouts into paintings and then they became sculptural? [What] I remember was the show at, the 1998 show at Urban Evidence at MOCA. Was that [the first time] that you actually started to cut into metal and other things?

Mark Howard [00:33:41] Almost. There was- It was a small exhibition at Art at the Powerhouse, maybe about a year or two earlier than that. And someone had made the suggestion that you should try to cut out things out of metal. And I thought, well, that’s a great idea. So I tried it and I thought I wanted to pursue it. Then it just grew and grew in terms of scale and just how it manifested itself. I actually started saving the scraps from the cutouts and playing with them in terms of just building little maquette sculptures and using that positive negative space. And that’s how they just became more sculptural. It was just actually, you know, it was not forgetting where they came from, but using the after effects of it.

William Busta [00:34:59] And then since that time, you’ve done a lot of public art projects.

Mark Howard [00:35:06] The public art projects, yeah, that’s the latest. I almost don’t see any difference between all of them in a weird way. The largest and latest has been the Euclid Corridor project. And that one is about. Almost six miles long. And with doing tree grates and trash receptacles and removable curbs, you know, I got a- I was privileged enough to get an opportunity to put a mark on that street. And I wanted to keep it very consistent in terms of the aesthetics and the content, so that there was a thematic theme and relevance and it wasn’t haphazard. And still, the ideas for some of them are based on textile designs, on Indian wampum belts and the beaded belts and sashes that the Indians would use as trading material. I used that for the imagery for the tree grates. And those took on a different patterning up and down the street. And for the trash receptacles, it was also once again using pattern. And that was laser-cut steel for those. And I wanted to use- Since Euclid Avenue was going to be a “smart street,” I thought that the best design would be to use imagery that made no sense. And a friend of mine, Charles Adams, was in his office and he had a wastebasket and inside of it was all these, you know, papers that bad printouts from a laptop and computer. And they had all these wonderful symbols. And I just picked one out and decided that’s the imagery. That’s the best imagery that would make sense for a smart street. And so I just wrapped that around. It took a long time, though, to figure out which imageries and which symbols, because they mean nothing. They represent something, but they mean nothing. And then with the removable curbs, those were three images that define certain districts along Euclid Avenue. There’s a fashion retail part, there is a biomedical, and there is the arts. And so those three designs, those were not laser cut. Those like the tree grates, those were cast. It was interesting taking the idea from the paper cutouts and seeing how they evolved, because then they sort of left my hands and went on the street. And that was a far cry from what a painting does. It’s out of your hands.

William Busta [00:39:04] Were you present when those were being cut?

Mark Howard [00:39:07] Yeah. That’s great- It’s like, it’s- When you see the laser, I mean, it just cuts it in like seconds and these huge sheets of metal and you’re just really in awe of it because, you know, you just, you stand by because you don’t want to get too close, because you think if I get too close, a laser is going to thing and I’m going to lose an arm or something. But you know when you’ve got like 200 trash receptacles and they’re getting, you know, they can be cut in a week.

William Busta [00:39:40] All 200 of them.

Mark Howard [00:39:41] All 200 in a week. And it’s wonderful and it’s everything that I wanted to have them look like. You don’t know what they’re going to look like until you actually see the thing. It’s like any sculpture, I guess. You get this preconceived idea of what, what you’re going to create and then, you know, things can change. And it still was a surprise. The tree grates. I wanted to have stainless steel, but then, you know, forces out of my control in the steel world drove the prices up. Originally, I didn’t want anything to rust. I was tired of the metaphors of Rustbelt City. And I was just sick of it. And I said, no, rust will be allowed. And then the price of steel just skyrocketed. And I thought, well, maybe we can find some other materials, because I desperately wanted to just have this really fresh new look. And then you started getting to engineering issues, which it’s fascinating because it’s a whole different world from what I was taught and the departments that I attended at the Institute. I wasn’t an industrial design major, so I had to learn these things right on the spot. And so that was a bit challenging.

William Busta [00:41:35] In your thinking about what public art should be- I mean, it’s not just- It’s just not the technical stuff. But there’s also that question of what should public art be? Which is a different set of questions than a painter sort of faces in the studio saying what a painting should be. Because there’s more of an implied dialogue with an audience. Charles Adams was an architect.

Mark Howard [00:41:58] Yes.

William Busta [00:41:58] And did he help you with that type of thinking? Did you discuss this?

Mark Howard [00:42:04] Oh, yeah, we discussed a lot. Great mentor. It is a different world. You know, public art, you have to let go of a lot of things. There’s certain content that just will not be accepted. And what was accepted 50 years ago, you couldn’t get away with doing now. The diversity of the population demands certain representation. There’s issues with that- There’s a lot- You know, there’s just a lot of factors that are very different from almost a very closed world of being in a studio or gallery. You have to- You’re in dialogue with the public, and ultimately they’re the ones who really judge whether or not that piece of public art is worth its merit.

William Busta [00:43:27] There’s, of course, the indirect way that if you do a successful piece of public art, you get invited to do another one.

Mark Howard [00:43:34] Yes. And if you don’t, you don’t get back. It’s like- It’s like what?

William Busta [00:43:42] You don’t get invited.

Mark Howard [00:43:43] You don’t get invited back. You’re that bad person who did something wrong at the party.

William Busta [00:43:51] Erin, I’m going to interrupt this. You worked on the Euclid Avenue project. Do you have any questions before we go on to another thing about Mark’s participation in that?

Erin Bell [00:44:03] No, I’m aware of this stuff, and I was wondering who made it. I like it. I don’t have any questions, though.

William Busta [00:44:08] Okay, go on. I’m going to sort of move from the artwork to more things about how your career developed. And because that’s part of what the show is about, is allowing people to have their own respect responses. And this. Did you. What were the largest obstacles that you faced as an artist with developing your career, developing your artwork? However you want to define obstacles.

Mark Howard [00:44:45] Oh, well, probably the- One of the obstacles- I can also tell you some of the things that were not obstacles. One of the things was, what do you do once you graduate and you want to find a space? And I finally found one. And I kept thinking, well, Lord, how am I going to afford this space? And I really lucked out and there was no support system because once you’re out of the university circle, that’s it. And there were quite a few obstacles in terms of how would you do these large scale pieces and trying to find avenues and venues to exhibit them. There weren’t too many galleries around at the time. They tended to be a little bit more firmly established. And a lot of artists took matters in their own hands at that time and period and created. What do you call those galleries now? The artist run galleries, Co-ops. And at times you often felt that you didn’t have that. Sometimes your obstacles were from people from different communities and it made it rough for you. Sometimes being artists of color can be almost a double edged sword because oftentimes the very labeling of black artists for some can be limiting. And for some it’s not an issue. For some it can be an obstacle because once you label something, you control it. And oftentimes I would think that, well, suppose I didn’t do anything with content, you know, would they still invite me in the show? Maybe I’ll just screw them all up and do an abstraction. You know, those type of things that made you, you know, at that age wonder, you know, are these obstacles or are these things in my head, that type of thing. But there were also opportunities that superseded obstacles like that. You know, I was fortunate enough to at the time be an assistant preparator at the New Gallery when it was on Bellflower, when I was just out of school and I got to hang Peter Halley’s and Mapplethorpe’s and Serrano’s and Warhol’s [works] and a lot of public art. Even at the time I didn’t even know what it really was. And it just exposed me to a lot of opportunities that probably mitigated obstacles that may have happened later, made me see a little broader picture of things.

William Busta [00:49:09] You know, and who, what’s helped you more than anything else? What do you think has assisted those, the other. And what’s assisted your career? What’s sort of like, have there been any people or any, any institutions that you feel have gone out of their way that has really made a difference for you?

Mark Howard [00:49:34] Oh yeah, there’s been individuals, institutions. There were several friends and most of them have passed away who were very influential. And one was a friend of mine, a dear friend was Michael Gilberto and he was from Manhattan and his partner had started a men’s clothing business, a million-dollar men’s clothing business. And we’re all over the place in Manhattan and Rome and everything. And he was a definite, he could walk in a room and completely read a whole crowd. It was amazing. I’d never seen anyone do that before. And he was very art savvy and he used to go to all the openings. He knew Keith Haring, he knew Mapplethorpe and met all of these people and went to all of those nightclubs in Manhattan in the ’80s that were heavily influenced by the East Village scene. And so he came to Cleveland and we hooked up, became friends. And when I first graduated, I didn’t know what I was going to do and I thought, well, I’m going to be the art director for the Ritz nightclub. And when I got there, nothing happened. And then the director left, the art director and then Mike said, well, here’s your opportunity, you know. So I started doing art exhibits there and I had a $300 budget and that was it, no more, no less. And I would do whatever I wanted to do. If I wanted to do murals on the walls, the owner, the manager would just say here, the paint’s in the other room, go for it. And it was great. It was a wonderful learning experience that he brought me in contact with media and how to promote yourself and, and wonderful, wonderful experiences that I couldn’t duplicate now, can’t even really describe them. You know, you do artwork for Grace Jones in a nightclub and you work till two in the morning and do, you know, nine foot tall portraits and you know, design disposable art lunch boxes silkscreened with, with the big time wrestling for a sandwich shop downtown. And he really kind of diversified what I thought my base should be and not just simply in a gallery, but diversify it. And then, you know, Charles Adams also did the same but gave me more technical expertise and took it on to another level. What he thought should be another level for me in terms of seeing a broader picture and the actual production of making art, how it’s produced and the budgets and very influential people. I wouldn’t, I think I wouldn’t be where I’m at if I hadn’t met people like that. And you know, there’s, you know, RTA has been very kind and progressive and Toby Lewis and Marjorie Talalay who actually gave me my first show of paper cutouts at the Play House. So there were a lot of, there were a lot of instrumental people and basically everyone that I met at the New Gallery on Bellflower when it was in its very early days, it was a very small, it’s not the Huge center that it is now, it was much more intimate. You had Marjorie and Toby and Lindy Barnett and. And you know, it was small. It was small, but you learned a lot.

William Busta [00:54:31] I’m going to end up with like two questions, and one of which is with your work. What sort of thing do you have in mind? An audience when you make work, do you have in mind a sort of response that you want or do you. Or do you take the other sort of tact where you make art and how people. And the fact that people respond to it means you can make more art?

Mark Howard [00:55:00] I never know what they’re gonna respond. I don’t- I just make it. You know, sometimes I used to do really sneaky things and in the public art, and I would go up into a room where I did a mural and someone is staring at it, and then I would like say, oh, my God, who do you know who did that? And then just wait to see what they would say. And then hopefully they said something nice. But if they didn’t, I just thought, okay. But no, I don’t, I don’t. You know, I keep it open for myself, you know, you know, you, you know what the demands are when you’re doing public art in terms of- But you sort of keep an open space mentally, you know, so you’re not just, you know, feeding them what they want to see and hear.

William Busta [00:56:06] I guess the other thing is, is there anything else you want you wish to say, add to what we’ve already talked about?

Mark Howard [00:56:17] I think I’ve said it. I think I’ve said it all.

Erin Bell [00:56:25] I do have one quick question. I was just wondering what it was about the CIA campus that impressed you so much when you came here. You said you walked around the campus and you just thought, wow.

Mark Howard [00:56:37] Well, we went to Philly, okay? Let’s be honest. We went to Philadelphia College of Art to- I have to give them this. Now, they were in the midst of renovation and the place was a wreck. And I just thought, I can’t live here. And it was in the middle of downtown, which was exciting, really exciting. But I kept thinking, I don’t know if I really want to be this close to downtown, you know, and it was really, really cramped and really small, and it just didn’t look like- It just didn’t look fun at all. And then when I came to Cleveland, you know, you saw like this big sprawling campus in Wade Park and the lagoon. And I just thought, you know, and we had, at that time, we had a five-year program, and I just thought, I want to come here, and it just seemed more disciplined here too. It gave you room to grow, where I think in a lot of the schools on the East Coast that I had visited, you seem to be rushed a little. And here they seem to give you more breathing space to grow.

William Busta [00:58:03] Thank you very much.

Mark Howard [00:58:04] Okay.

William Busta [00:58:05] That was very good. I didn’t. I mean, there’s- I’ve learned- I learned a great deal I didn’t know. The one thing that’s, that I hadn’t realized is the- How much the club scene and you influenced and gave you space to start creating public art and thinking about it from the very, very beginning.

Mark Howard [00:58:30] Yeah, it was very instrumental. It was very instrumental. That’s where I did my first installations. First dealings with projecting. Well, actually, I was projecting film onto canvas at school, but then projecting film on scrims and canvases and nightclubs and it really gave you a lot of opportunity and freeway. And you didn’t make anything really to last, which was the freedom in and of itself. You know, it was there for that weekend and it was gone the next.

William Busta [00:59:16] So you could do anything.

Mark Howard [00:59:18] And if it failed, it failed.

William Busta [00:59:21] You didn’t have to worry about it.

Mark Howard [00:59:22] You didn’t have to worry about it. And it was great, you know, and it’s just like, the paint’s in the next room. Go for it. And then, you know, you’d be up till three or four in the morning and then open the doors and boom, there they were. And you don’t have that anymore. Those days are gone.

William Busta [00:59:46] We have our own times.

Mark Howard [00:59:48] Yeah. Thank you.

William Busta [00:59:50] Thank you. Mark has also done- You know, you see that, like his mural on the side of the Cleveland School for the Arts. As you go up towards Cedar Hill, there’s one whole wall of the Cleveland School for the Arts. It’s a big mural. And there’s also, if you manage to go to the new wing of the airport, there’s a long corridor under underneath where Mark’s things are on either side sort of cut out.

Mark Howard [01:00:20] Those have held up really well, too.

William Busta [01:00:23] There’s a ceiling of one of the rooms at Cleveland Public Library. So there’s a lot of mural out on East 55th Street just north of Chester.

Mark Howard [01:00:31] Did you ever see the fountain?

William Busta [01:00:33] No, I didn’t.

Mark Howard [01:00:34] No. There’s a fountain on 37th and Woodland at Arbor Village. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like 55 feet wide, you know, with the little spouts to dance and forth and everything. Yeah, that was fun.

William Busta [01:00:56] Okay.

Mark Howard [01:00:59] Okay.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Additional Files
901019.csv (7 kB)
901019 Mark Howard.txt (38 kB)
Download

Share

COinS