Brianna Howard

Brianna Howard

MFA Student Painting

Brianna Howard is a painter whose work investigates accumulation, repetition, and perceptual systems. Using thousands of repeated marks, she builds surfaces that shift between order and interference, creating optical vibration and subtle instability.

Howard earned a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Boston University (2022) and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Studio Art from Brandeis University (2023). She is currently completing an MFA in Painting at Tyler School of Art, Temple University (expected 2026). Selected exhibitions include Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Philadelphia), Gallery 263 (Boston), Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston), and the Cambridge Art Association (Boston). She has participated in residencies and programs including Anderson Ranch Center and the New York Academy of Art, and her work is included in the permanent collections of Boston University and the Copley Society of Art.

sample of Brianna Howard's work
sample of Brianna Howard's work

Artist Statement

My paintings build themselves through repetition. A single dot holds little on its own, but placed among thousands it becomes a field, a vibration, a surface, or a structure. The mark is both microscopic and architectural, intimate in its making but expansive in its accumulation. The works do not resolve immediately; they unfold over time, shifting between tactile texture and distant optical effect.

The grid is both tool and matrix, guiding dots into grids that are never fully stable. What begins as order slips into misalignment, producing interference, moiré, and flicker. These distortions echo digital breakdown, where images degrade into low fidelity. Yet instability is generative, and form emerges not through clarity but through overlap and tension between systems that cannot fully align. I find meaning in the friction of accumulation rather than in a single resolved image.

I am also interested in how information behaves, how it accumulates, shifts, and sometimes disappears. Each dot functions like a unit of data. Up close it reads as texture; from a distance it becomes a network of relations that resists one interpretation. I stage interference through grids slipping against each other, creating moiré-like vibrations. I am exploring how knowledge can be misread or degraded, and how systems can contain meaning that is sensed but not fully decoded. I investigate the tension between clarity and noise, structure and error, presence and absence, and how information exists as both material and pattern, tangible and elusive.

In this way, my work behaves less like representation and more like inscription, closer to writing or code. Built mark by mark, the paintings create duration, holding pressure, memory, and interference. They refuse resolution and invite sustained attention and the possibility of emergence between control and slippage.