Ridley Howard

Ridley Howard offers glimpses of characters and settings in his paintings, creating atmosphere through his use of colour, gesture and composition. Taking inspiration from hand-drawn film posters from the 1960s and 70s, Howard teases the viewer with a story untold, showing just a singular moment caught in flux, rather than an outright display of a characters’ plot. Drawing from magazines, films, and advertisements, his figures are abstracted just out of the realm of familiarity, creating a tension between reminiscence and unease. Howard’s skillful combination of American Realism with Geometric Abstraction experiments with light and colour, distorting familiar forms through their hue and shade, forming hazy landscapes that transplant the figures both everywhere and nowhere.  

Howard (b. 1973) received his BFA in Painting and BA in Art History from the University in Georgia in 1996, before completing his MFA at Tufts University in 1999. He has completed residencies with Skowhegan School of Painting (2000), the 2010 Visiting Artists Residency through the CCA in Mallorca, and the 2012 Visiting Artist Residency of the Villa Lena Foundation. Howard is the recipient of several awards, including the 2020 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the 2011 Traveling Scholars Fellowship from SMFA, the 2006 Joan Joan Mitchell Foundation Career Opportunity Grant, and the 2001 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. His works have been shown globally by galleries and museums such as the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Hall Art Foundation, Vermont; Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill; New Bedford Art Museum; and Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor. Howard’s work can be found in the collections of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts. Howard works between Athens, Georgia, and Brooklyn, New York.