Mark Howard Wins Cleveland Arts Prize for Lifetime Achievement: Subtracting and Adding and Subtracting and Adding

Winner of the 2025 Cleveland Arts Prize for Lifetime Achievement is painter and sculptor Mark Howard. Howard’s work is held in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and is visible in public art around the city. He has exhibited internationally and was included in the Biennale Internazionale dell’ Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy, 2001. He’s currently represented by HEDGE Gallery.  A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1986, he previously exhibited for several years with William Busta. CAN asked Busta to give his perspective on the artist’s career. – Ed.

Let’s say that you are a young artist, sort of fresh out of art school and with ambition and vision you manage to set up a studio.  And in fits and starts you begin to be productive.  And you need to be able to do this all the while managing a day job that pays the rent and all the other things.  But it is important, so in a lot of ways it is not a struggle for you.  And then, in just a few years you have done all those things that a young artist needs to do – you develop and master a technique that is suitable for expressing your vision; you create powerful content on a grand scale; and your work draws critical attention and praise; you start to find an audience; and then your work shows up as the cover of [Dialogue, which was at the time] the most important art publication in the state. You might think that the gold ring is within your grasp.

And then you learn that the toxicity in the chemicals that are essential to your technique cause cancer, and you need to start over.  It is hard and takes time and commitment, but by then you know what it is to be an artist and how to be an artist.

The first works of Mark Howard to gain attention were large canvases with multi-layered silk-screened images.  When an artist creates an image by silk-screening, he first creates a stencil, so the image produced is what is not blocked out on the screen. The artist’s intelligence and then their hand creates a negative matrix of the image that he desires.   What is left open is where the ink flows through the screen.  It is a process of adding by subtracting.

The toxicity of his technique failed him, but the mental process that he used to create the canvases have informed the work that he has created for the past three decades.  He has been forming imagery by subtracting and adding ever since – sometimes making images by the negative space of cut-outs; sometimes cutting and pasting positive elements in collages.  His imagery is consistent with the hard edge of stencil; his compositional genius in color choice and juxtaposition produces a vibrating pulse that energizes.

Mark Howard graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1986, part of the generation after the baby boom.  Generation X.  As that generation matured in the 1980s, the popular reputation was of dissonance – music that was noise, piercing and tattoos that marred; language and content that was intentionally irritable.  In 1991 SPACES, in Cleveland, presented ”Cleveland X,” an exhibition ambitious to identify the best regional artists born since 1960.    The artists in “Cleveland X” provide part of the context in which Mark Howard’s introspective imagination soared.   He was in the show – of course – as were photographer and film-maker Kevin Everson, rock-imagist Derek Hess, film-maker Robert Banks, edgy printmaker Dexter Davis, graphic provocateur Clay Parker, and the sculptural duo of Patti Fields and Ray Juaire.  It is the kind of context in which one is challenged to find similarities, but makes sense all the same.   Among all those artists, there’s a lot of reflecting upon personal experience, emphasis upon the human form, and assembling from what is at hand.

Art is not formed in isolation – it grabs everything is can throughout a life.  In Howard’s work there is something of his teachers at Cleveland Institute of Art – something of Ed Mieczcowski in his compositional structure, and something of Julian Stanczak in his color theory. Along the way, he has looked at and responded to Henri Matisse’s paper cutouts, medieval Ethiopian religious iconography, Andy Warhol paintings, and most recently, German expressionism.

And there is the city which he has graced with his work.  You might see it every day – a mural on the side of a building on East 55th street; image-perforated trash containers along Euclid Avenue; or his iconic mural at the Cleveland School for the Arts.

Lifetime achievement is not something that happens by the insight of a curator or the consensus of a committee – it is something that a community awards by acclimation to someone who contributes, persists, reflects, and stirs the heart.  Mark Howard reads the city and speaks of our experience.  He repositions our understanding of relationships, undermines assumptions of power, cheekily suggests an embrace of the erotic and sacred.  Sometimes this all seems too political, sometimes too personal.  And that’s so important for all of us.

Additional winners of the 2025 Cleveland Arts Prize are:
● Emerging Artist Award: Ali Black (Literature)
● Mid-Career Artist: Jason Vieaux (Music)

Special Prize Honorees:
● Special Citation from the Board of Trustees: Jennie Jones
● Barbara S. Robinson Prize for the Advancement of the Arts: Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation
● Robert P. Bergman Prize: Greg Peckham
● Martha Joseph Prize for Distinguished Service to the Arts: Robin Pease

The 65th Annual Cleveland Arts Prize Awards Ceremony
6:30 pm Wednesday, October 22
Doors open at 6 pm
Simon and Rose Mandel Theatre, Cuyahoga Community College Eastern Campus
Tickets: Clevelandartsprize.org