Mike Howat is a New Hampshire-based painter and educator. His work explores themes of urbanization, Americana, and collective memory. Since earning his B.F.A. from New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2014, he has been actively engaged in the growing New England art scene. He exhibits regionally and nationally. He showed regularly with Kelley Stelling Contemporary and has shown with Chase’s Garage, Gay Street Gallery (VA) Rochester Museum of Fine Arts, Nahcotta, Talon Gallery (PDX), Carrie Secrist Gallery (Chicago), Nucleus Portland, among others.
Howat was the long-term artist-in-residence at Kimball Jenkins School of Art from 2016- 2020, where he also teaches. Since 2020, he has taught at AVA Gallery & Art Center and also coordinates an outreach program which features weekly studio visits and artist demos. In 2021, he was the artist-residence at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA.
Howat started dabbling with curating in 2018 with Figuratively Speaking, an exhibition of established and emerging abstract artists in the Northeast, and recently became a curatorial advisor for the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts. He co-curated SALON 2021 and SALON 2022 at Kimball Jenkins school of Art in 2021 and 2022, exhibitions that featured over 300 artists collectively, and has plans for future satellite curatorial projects.
When not in his studio, he’s likely wandering the coast or the White Mountains in NH.
