Norma Howard

Early life

Howard grew up in a small, rural Oklahoma community. Her family was poor and her parents struggled to raise their six children. Howard's maternal grandmother had come to Oklahoma from Mississippi in the early 20th century as part of the second removal along the Choctaw Trail of Tears. Her grandmother spoke Choctaw, not English, and would sometimes tell the children stories in Choctaw. Howard's father's family had come to Indian Territory earlier, during the first removal, and at first settled in the Atoka area. Later her grandfather decided to move his family to Stigler, Oklahoma, where there were better schools; they owned land and grew cotton.

Howard recalls drawing on anything she could: with a stick in the dirt, on brown paper bags, even on pages of an encyclopedia. She first attended a small country school with both white and Indian children. When other children played with toys or dolls that she did not have, Howard would draw what she saw "and that made me feel like I had those things." After third grade, when that school closed, she and her siblings attended Stigler schools, where she was the only Native child in her class. Howard vividly remembers one teacher that scolded her for drawing "Indian things" on the chalkboard, and for a while she stopped drawing altogether.

Her parents were proud of her art. Her father, a house painter, carried some of her drawings in his wallet. Using cheap paint palettes available at the local general store, Howard taught herself to paint. Once her father even took off a day of work to show her paintings at a local event. In 1974 people at a gift shop in Tahlequah "laughed at my work, like they didn't want it." After Howard started her family and began working at a sewing factory, she didn't have much time to paint. Then the factory closed down, and Howard worried about finding another job. In a dream she heard her late father say to her, "Paint. That's what you always wanted to do."

Early career

Howard's husband David insisted they visit an art supply store in another town to buy her better paints and paper to use. David also pushed Howard to enter her work in the annual Red Earth art market in Oklahoma City. She had just missed the deadline in 1995 to enter her work as a new artist but was allowed her to submit her request late. As Howard sat among the other artists and their works, she noticed her art was very different from most others. It seemed everything was Southwestern or Plains art. She listened as third place was announced, then second place, and she thought she had lost. When the announcer called "Norma Howard" for first place, she sat stunned, head down. That morning she had sold every painting in her booth. At Red Earth 1996, Howard won again.

After encouragement from Paul Rainbird, of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, Howard exhibited at the 1997 Santa Fe Indian Market and every year since. In 1998 she received a prestigious Santa Fe Market fellowship. She used it to travel to Mississippi to visit ancestral places of the Choctaws. Those swamps and lands have continued to inspire her paintings of Choctaw history, when Choctaws hid from troops who sent Native people west to Indian Territory.

Style and notable works

As a self-taught artist, Howard has developed a unique style of watercolor painting that uses tiny brushstrokes, cross-hatching and layers to produce depth. Her landscapes almost always include people, because she believes it is people who give art life. She remembers as a child using a View-Master to look at pictures "so real you could touch it." Growing up, she did not know any Indian artists; in fact did not know many other Native families until her teens. So she was not aware of other Native art. Her first goal as an artist was to make something good enough for her mother and father to hang in their living room.

Her painting Green Corn is in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while three more paintings hang in the Landmark Bank in Durant, Oklahoma. Since 2003, Howard has been represented by Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Awards and notable exhibitions