Staff Creatives: Rowan Howe

Creativity runs high among College of Fine Arts staff members, both in their day jobs in the college supporting our research and educational mission and in their personal lives. The college has an unusually high number of practicing artists, musicians and performers — many of them alumni — on our teams.

Rowan Howe (M.F.A., Studio Art, 2023) is the graduate program coordinator in the Department of Art and Art History. 

How many years have you worked in the College of Fine Arts?

I have been the graduate program coordinator for the Department of Art and Art History for the past year. Prior to that, I was adjunct faculty in Painting & Drawing, as well as the exhibitions coordinator for the Visual Arts Center.

Describe your creative practice.

I use a variety of material techniques to create paintings that consider the complexities of female sexuality. My recent body of work utilizes acrylic washes on raw canvas, thin oil glazes to build up the subjects and watercolor pencil details that bleed and drip. The resulting flattened bodies echo the opaque and often uncertain nature of women's sexual experiences, attempting to capture the absurdity of feeling both connected and alone.

How did you get started in your creative practice?

I have been interested in making images since childhood and was fortunate to grow up in a city (Chicago) that gave me access to prominent arts institutions from a young age. I recently revisited a painting in the Art Institute that always struck me in elementary school — Ferdinand Hodler's Day (Truth) — and was quite amused to see how much my current body of work has borrowed from that painting's composition, palette and emotive quality.

What does a typical day look like when you’re balancing both your work and creative passions?

Balance is something I am still trying to figure out. Fortunately, I have had consistent opportunities to show this past year, which gives me hard deadlines to work toward. While discussing studio progress with a friend recently, he shared a too true sentiment: "It just has to happen." I am looking forward to finding a more sustainable way of balancing my creative practice with my work life, but I would say a good start is finding an hour every day to be in the studio.

Any advice for students as they think about their professional pathways?

Think about how you want to live each day and let those values guide your professional path.

How do you define success as an artist? How has that definition evolved over time?

As an undergraduate student, I probably would have defined success as being a full-time studio artist with regular exhibitions. However, as I get older, I find that feeling of "success" in supportive communities, experimental collaboration and creative conversation.