If you ask why I make sculpture, I must answer that it is my way of life, my balance, and my justification for being.

David Smith

The life of the artist is one that in almost every respect is governed by chance. Not only must the certainty of success be permanently forfeited by the professional artist, even the choices they make in creating an artwork cannot be wholly claimed as their own: they are equally the result of the multitude of external forces that converge to form the narrow field of action in which the artist is compelled to do their work. Every artist must begin with what's in front of them. Only there, in what is closest at hand, are they able to discover that other realm of meaning, foreign to everyday life yet coinciding with it exactly, from which art derives its enigmatic powers. Art seduces those who lack certainty in the authority of facts, for whom the old, familiar face of things only masks the unknown and unseen.

For sculptor Brad Howe (b. 1959, Riverside, CA), the practice of making art stems from an understanding of reality as divided between those aspects for which concepts already exist and those still without, for whom a language still waits be found. The function of art, for Howe, is indissolubly bound up with its ability to articulate the latent meaning of undigested experience, to speak from beyond the bounds of consciousness, from the point where subject and object are one.

Howe's approach to art reflects his own history of becoming an artist. Growing up in working class family, the artist's vocation was never an obvious one to him. Yet a childhood marked by constant moving provided him with an early education in the art of reinvention. Cast as the perpetual stranger (having to attend a different school each year), Howe developed strategies of adaptation that could allow him to integrate into the constantly shifting social landscape which formed the foundation of his youth. Possessed by an innate curiosity and an easy-going disposition, his sense of identity became increasingly unmoored. As he learned to change the outward expressions of his personality in relation to what he saw in the environment around him, he began to understand the artist's self as a malleable construction rather than a fixed and given value. Reacting empathetically to the world as he experienced it, Howe turned his position as outsider into a vantage point from where the various modes of life in our society could be seen in their essential unity, as expressions of one-and-the-same yearning: for freedom, for happiness.

In 1977, Howe traveled to Brazil as an exchange student from Laguna Beach High and, for the first time in his life, found himself confronted with the paranoid existentialism of a country deep in the throes of a violent military dictatorship. At the same time, everyday life in Brazil was replete with exuberance. Art and music filled the air not plaintively but with a defiant jocundity—suffused with an indefatigable will to live despite whatever suffering must be endured. This commingling of drastic extremes left a profound impression on Howe, and he returned to live in Brazil twice more: in 1980 as student at the University of Sao Paulo on exchange from Stanford, where he was studying History, Economics, and Literature with the aim of pursuing a diplomatic career, and then again from 1984-89, when he declared himself an artist. 

This transition, from the respectability of transnational politics to the uncertainty of an artist's life, had been affected by Howe's encounter with the architecture department at the University of Sao Paulo, where he found students who, despite the severity of the social situation, possessed a peculiar optimism about the prospects for a different future, not far off in the distance. Architecture, they thought, could help usher in a more egalitarian way of life by shaping the affective dimensions of space, designing buildings that could create the ambient conditions of a burgeoning democracy. Their approach emphasized open communal spaces and prioritized the interior of buildings over their facade. They sought out designers, artists, furniture makers, and whoever else to collaborate with on a total design for their buildings' interiors, wanting to conceive of every potential element as a part of an overall aesthetic unity that embraced all aspects of the individual's embodied experience of space. Fascinated by their confidence in the power of art, Howe armed himself with a book on Alexander Calder and began to experiment. He found a barn in the countryside between Sao Paulo and Rio and got to work shearing small pieces of scrap metal that he would then paint with lacquer and arrange into kinetic sculptures that borrowed from Calder but also showed a distinct personality. The bright, garish colors of Brazilian fashion; the overabundance of the tropical landscape; the patterned tile work of its courtyards and sidewalks; the improvised growth of expanding favelas—became intertwined with the influence already exerted on Howe by the surreal, quasi-modernism of the cartoons he grew up watching; the biomorphic vernacular of California's mid-century hot rod culture; and the appearance of effortless grace to which surfers like him aspired. 

The work was oddly idiosyncratic but based on a solid foundation. Lacking a formal education in art, Howe trained his skills as a sculptor by engaging in an active dialogue with the past, working through call and response: looking at a piece by Calder or Kandinsky or Klee, he would try to reconstruct the problem they had tried to address and came up with his own alternative solutions, each of which would reveal some new aspect of the possibilities of sculpture he had not yet considered. Through this iterative mode of production, Howe's early practice began to take shape, and in 1985, after going door-to-door through the galleries of Rio—naively unaware of how the art world conducted its business—he found his first patron in the form of architect-dealer Matias Marcier, who not only promised to buy whatever Howe could produce but also gave him his first solo exhibition and introduced him to an echelon of clients that provided a steady stream of commission-based work. Howe became a darling of the Brazilian art world, featured in popular magazines and widely collected among the upper classes of Rio and Sao Paulo. Working on projects alongside an architect like Marcier, Howe began to appreciate the way that sculpture could inhabit space with a greater degree of intention by reacting to a site's specific features, reflecting them within its own formal structure. Through these kinds of commissions, Howe sought to animate the site as a moment of the work and vice versa—each charging the other in a dialectical interplay of figure and ground.

Despite his growing success in Brazil, family matters obliged Howe to return to Los Angeles at the end of the decade. He rented a storage unit as a studio and worked by night to avoid use restrictions. His first show, at a Laguna Beach gallery, miraculously sold-out before it had opened, and Howe once again found himself as the chosen beneficiary of a wealthy clientele's attraction to art. He became a darling among his collectors, who recognized in him a kindred spirit: someone who, disregarding the risk of failure, had struggled against the odds to realize an improbable dream. With their support (literally hosting what he called a "barn-raising" auction to finance construction), he was able to build a studio in the mountains of Malibu where his ability to produce large-scale work dramatically improved. This increased fabrication capacity allowed Howe to focus more and more on public commissions, through which he hoped to implement the ideas around site-specific sculpture he had already begun to explore in Brazil. In the 35 years since coming home to California, Howe has completed over one hundred public projects around the world, including commissions for the Port of Los Angeles, the city of Biberach, Germany, and the Havana Biennial, among many others. In addition to the numerous public and private collections that hold his work, Howe's sculptures can be seen along major roadways, in municipal plazas, on college campuses, and in the lobbies and hallways of major hospitals and healthcare centers—places where his work can engage, in an indirect, playful, and roundabout way, with the concerns of a particular community, for whom the aesthetic experience provided is not divorced from everyday life as it might be in a gallery or museum, but, integrated into their normal routine, becomes a part of their lifeworld, a benevolent presence.

Howe sees his practice as an extended dialogue with the laws of physics. He likens sculpture to dancing with gravity: learning how to balance the mass of an object, how to pitch and pivot its weight, leveraging a rising gesture with a downward pull, forming the work through a process of call and response. Through this negotiation—between what Howe imagines and what physics allows—the sculpture begins to resemble something organic, something self-constructed. The other metaphor Howe likes to apply to his practice is that he as an artist is no more than a gardener. The works, in a sense, make themselves. He merely tends to them as they grow. He tills the land, fertilizes the soil, and plants the seeds; the sculptures bloom. The intention with which Howe begins a work is a catalyst for growth, but as the sculpture takes shape, this initial conception morphs into something unanticipated. As an artist, Howe seeks to cultivate a sense of perpetual discovery. For him, each project raises so many potential questions about the formal and conceptual possibilities of sculpture that a single work will often generate the starting point for two or three new works that will in turn suggest a whole other set of new directions in an infinitely expanding array of work yet to be realized—a flourishing garden of aesthetic feeling. 

What Howe aims to achieve is a recognition of the fluid nature of aesthetic experience. By making use of common construction materials—working primarily with welded-together pieces of industrial-grade aluminum and stainless steel colored with polyurethane (the same way a car would be assembled and painted)—but, finding a formal syntax in which these elements can acquire a new kind of meaning, distinct but not separate from their heir practical usefulness (since these elements still play a necessary structural role in supporting the weight of the work), Howe is able to show the undetermined, open-ended quality that things can still possess despite their fixed appearance. Howe's sculptures are real constructions, but ones that, as constructs, serve no other purpose than being what they are: visions of transformation as such.

Howe has published two major monographs of his work—Serious Exuberance (Noriega Editores, 1999) and Dance of Atoms (Skira, 2022)—in addition to numerous exhibition catalogues. He lives and works in Malibu, CA, where he plans to turn his studio into a publicly accessible art center.

Patrick Zapien

June 2026