ART! Homage to Artist and Teacher Howard Windham at Imago

Image, top: “Untitled,” 14 X 14” acrylic grid painting by Corey Windham

Imago Foundation for the Arts (IFA) will present an exhibition celebrating the life and work of artist, teacher, and longtime Imago artist Howard Windham. The exhibition will also feature artwork by his daughter, Brett, his son, Corey, and Imago exhibiting artists.

The exhibition will be on view September 5 – 26 at IMAGO Gallery, 36 Market St, Warren, RI.

A complimentary reception for the artists will take place from 5- 8 p.m. on Saturday, September 5 offering some of Howard’s favorite chocolate chip cookies and music by Bob Drouin and Josh Cain.

A Rhode Island School of Design graduate and professor emeritus from the University of Massachusetts/Dartmouth, where he completed his Master of Fine Arts, Windham’s collages, paintings, and sculptures have been exhibited throughout New England. This exhibition offers a look back at his work from the 1960s through the 2020s and the through lines that show up in works by his first- and third-born children, Corey and Brett. His signature grids, dots, and lines recur in his work throughout the decades — referencing the aphorism that great forms can be constructed from the most minuscule of building blocks.

His love of cats, reading, and baseball also will be on display, along with the profundity of a disciplined artist with pronounced facial recognition blindness who was compelled to make hundreds of invented face collages.

As an itinerant visual design educator, Corey Turner Windham taught thousands of K-4 students in Massachusetts for over 28 years. He says, “My early memories of my Dad were of him (without a moustache) swearing at rubber cement while he was meticulously gluing various colored paper dots made with a hole punch. Ironically, he was gluing colored square punched paper at the end.” During the COVID lockdown in 2020, Corey found himself making a series of grid paintings with acrylics similar to what he had done previously with colored pencils or watercolors in earlier sketchbooks.

Brett Day Windham is a multidisciplinary artist currently working with cyanotype. Her work is based on ideas about color and collecting. Using an intuitive sense of formal composition, she organizes collections of natural, commercial, and industrial remnants into multidisciplinary works that evoke mysticism and ritual. Her current work with hand-painted cyanotypes combines early-process photographs, paintings on paper, and objectless sculpture.

IFA Exhibiting Artists include Dot Bergen, Jim Cain, David Clarke, Eileen Siobhan Collins, Mary Dondero, Stephen Fisher, Philip Gruppuso, Gary Heise, Carl Keitner, Lisa Lowenstein, Eileen Mayhew, Linda Megathlin, Catherine Moylan, Rina Naik, Mercedes Nuñez, Anne Marie Rossi, Howard Rotblat-Walker, Lenny Rumpler, Duff Schweninger, Suzanne Taetzsch, Pat Warwick and Meredith Wolf.

Regular Imago Gallery hours are 12-3 p.m. Thursdays, noon to 6 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and noon to 4 p.m. Sundays. IFA is a non-profit organization run by artists for artists whose mission is to inspire creativity and promote art-making that enriches our communities.