A Curated Walk
22 works selected from the collection — for their rarity, their scale, or the part of Frank Howell's story only they can tell. Each is shown with a curatorial note; every one links to its full catalogue entry.
Lithographs
AP Artist's Proof
An elder wrapped in turquoise light, her hair streaming into a night sky scattered with drifting feathers — this large artist's proof distills everything Howell's mature work is known for. At 37 by 51 inches it is among the largest lithographs in the collection, and as an AP it preceded the published edition entirely.
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Lithographs · 1983
AP Artist's Proof
A monumental standing figure, wrapped in a buffalo robe rendered so densely it reads as geology, fixes the viewer with a level gaze. The saturated red at the throat — a signature Howell note — burns against an otherwise earthen palette. This artist's proof shows the image as Howell first approved it at the stone.
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Paintings
Original Acrylic Painting
A large acrylic in which Howell layers a contemporary portrait over ledger-drawing horses and a single red handprint — three generations of Plains image-making on one canvas. At over six feet wide it is one of the most ambitious paintings in the collection, and its title makes the inheritance explicit: these are the grandfather's echoes.
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Lithographs · 1986
ME Museum Edition - AP Artist's Proof - HC Hand Colored
One sheet carrying three rarity marks at once: a Museum Edition, an artist's proof, and hand coloring applied by Howell himself. The image — a Cheyenne woman folded into a white blanket, hair falling like a shadow — exists in the collection in several proof states, and together they document the image's entire life.
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Mixed Media · 1994
AP Artist's Proof
A blanketed elder above two scarlet handprints pressed straight onto the sheet — the print's quietest and loudest gestures side by side. This 1994 artist's proof combines lithography with hand-applied media, and the handprints tie the image back to the oldest mark a person can leave.
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Lithographs · 1998
ED# 40/225
A dancer flings an arm skyward and her shawl bursts into a storm of eagle feathers against a red-black ground — the most kinetic image in the collection. The edition was published in 1998, the year after Howell's death, making this numbered impression part of the artist's posthumous record.
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Prints & Posters · 1994
AP Artist's Proof
A profile in profound blue: a raven settles into the sitter's hair, its red crest the only warm note on the sheet. Printed in 1994, this artist's proof shows Howell's late serigraphy at its most controlled — a single color-world held from edge to edge.
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Lithographs · 1984
ED# 23/75
An elder in profile, drawn almost entirely in single contour lines, cradles a hawk that is rendered in full color and detail — the drawn and the painted sharing one sheet. This numbered impression from an edition of 75 shows the draftsman underneath Howell's painter reputation.
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Prints & Posters · 1991
ED# 81/225
A veiled figure in white rises out of a silver ground, face reduced to a mask-like emblem — one of Howell's most spectral images, published as a large serigraph in 1991. The screenprint medium gives the whites a chalky, fresco-like body that lithography cannot, and this impression retains its full margins.
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Lithographs · 1981
AP Artist's Proof
A wind-blown figure in violet robes reaches into a thicket of leaves that seem to grow out of the stone itself. Denser and darker than Howell's open-sky portraits, this 1981 artist's proof catches the moment his work turned from landscape toward the figure — here the two are still one organism.
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Paintings · 1994
Original Acrylic Painting
Two white-haired figures face each other inside a field of grey, their hair dissolving into weather — a near-monochrome canvas of extraordinary restraint, and at 68 by 80 inches the largest painting in the collection. Painted in 1994, it shows Howell pushing his familiar imagery toward abstraction in the last years of his life.
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Paintings · 1988
Original Acrylic Painting
Turquoise hair pours across a silver-white ground worked with metallic shimmer — a small canvas with the presence of a much larger one. Painted in 1988, it condenses Howell's signature palette (turquoise against warm neutrals) into its purest statement in the collection.
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Monotypes & Monoprints · 1987
Monotype
A lone figure stands at the seam of a red earth and an indigo sky, trailing ribbons of paint like regalia. As a monotype this is a unique impression, not an edition — the collection's monotype holdings preserve a side of Howell that worked fast, loose, and without a second chance.
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Monotypes & Monoprints · 1986
Monotype
The figure barely surfaces from the dark — a face, a blue-black sweep of hair, red earth closing around it. This 1986 monotype shows how far Howell would let an image dissolve when he was free of edition-making; it reads as a night song made visible, exactly as titled.
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Monotypes & Monoprints · 1986
Monotype
Canyon wall as pure form: ochre, umber, and one flick of turquoise and red at the ridge line. A monotype is a one-off — painted on the plate and printed once, unrepeatable — and this 44-inch sheet is among the largest and most abstract Howell made in the medium.
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Paintings · 1990
Original Acrylic Painting
A dirt road climbs through autumn brush under a green-grey storm ceiling — pure landscape, no figure anywhere. Painted in 1990 at nearly fifty inches wide, it is a reminder that the Southwest itself, not only its people, sat at the center of Howell's attention.
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Paintings · 1968
Original Egg Tempera Painting
A ruined interior rendered in egg tempera — torn wallboard, raked light, a window with nothing behind it — executed with a photorealist patience that will startle anyone who knows only Howell's portraits. Painted in 1968, it is the collection's clearest evidence of the technical range he chose to leave behind.
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Paintings · 1969
Original Oil Painting
Weathered barn boards painted so faithfully in oil that the picture is routinely mistaken for the thing itself — down to the rusted hinge and the fly that gives the painting its title. A 1969 trompe-l'oeil that shows the young painter mastering surfaces before he turned to faces.
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Sculpture
Original Bronze Sculpture
The collection's dimensional outlier: a bronze female figure crowned with horns, over three feet tall, its patina moving from oxblood to black. Sculpture is a rarity anywhere in Howell's output, and this cast extends the collection's claim to representing every medium the artist touched.
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Paintings · 1959
Original Acrylic Painting
A 1959 portrait in quiet blues and umbers, painted when Howell was twenty-two — academic, tender, and completely unlike the Southwestern imagery that made his name. Works from this decade almost never reach the market; the collection holds the record of where he began.
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Drawings & Sketches · 1957
Original Watercolor Sketch
The earliest dated work in the collection: a clenched hand in ink and wash, signed 'Frank Howell '57' — the artist at twenty. Made four decades before the luminous portraits he is known for, it already shows the obsession with weight, knuckle, and contour that carries through the entire archive.
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Drawings & Sketches · 1966
Original Conte Crayon Drawing
Frank Howell at about twenty-nine, in conte crayon on a torn-edged sheet he mounted himself: direct, unidealized, and steady-eyed. Self-portraits are scarce in Howell's output, and this 1966 drawing is the collection's most personal object — the artist looking at the man who would make everything else here.
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