Joanne Howard is an artist based in New York City who explores conflicting perceptions of beauty that are seen through the lens of appearances. Howard currently works in ceramics and photography, media wherein the artist first shapes multiple, recognizable portraits into abstract, over-pressed forms. Through sculptures and photographs the artist responds to the common quest for perfection, exposing distortion as both motive and consequence of underlying personal desires.

A series of overturned, gray heads faintly strikes a chord with the vase form, but the mottled and mashed physiognomies – at times warped beyond recognition – displace this traditional presumption and instead reveals the coarse and unflattering nature of clay itself. As a result, Howard’s rendition of the garbled face emerges through material elasticity. The assiduous focus on detail continues in the artist’s series titled The Elders, photographs of apples that reflect traces of expressions carved into the fruit’s ephemeral fibers. However before losing these objects entirely to decay, the artist has preserved each portrait through photo documentation, then reproducing each one into a large-scale, color format.

In 2008 the artist received a fellowship from the New York Foundation of the Arts, in the area of Architecture and Environmental Structures. Two years later she received the Bessie Award for best collaboration in Set Design for Big Dance Theater’s Comme Toujours Here I Stand. Her work also appears in the flat files of The Drawing Center, Pierogi 2000 and the Kentler International Drawing Space. The Kentler also featured Howard’s drawings in The Persistence of Line that took place in 2008 and Inside Out, in 2013.

Joanne Howard received her MFA from Hunter College in 2012 and has exhibited frequently throughout New York. In 2013 the artist’s apple portraits appeared at the gallery of New York Live Arts. From 2013 to 2014 she had a residency in the Ceramics Department at Hunter College. In 2013 Howard’s art was included in Aspects that took place at the Marina Gallery in Cold Spring Harbor last year. From July 31st to August 16th, the artist willparticipate in AS | Orchard a group show that will take place at 33 Orchard in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. From August 21st to October 19th, Joanne Howard will present Dream House at the Edward Hopper House, located in Nyack, New York. In September, Howard’s most recent set installation and design collaboration with Big Dance Theater will be presented at The Harvey BAM Alan Smithee Directed This Play.