On a Saturday evening in early September, the small gallery at 36 Market Street in Warren, Rhode Island, will fill with the smell of chocolate chip cookies and the sound of acoustic music. It will be a familiar scene for those who knew Howard Windham, the artist, teacher, and longtime Imago Gallery member who died in April 2025. Windham was known for many things: his meticulous collages built from tiny paper dots, his whimsical sculptures, his love of cats and baseball, and his habit of swearing at rubber cement while working. But above all, he was known for the faces.
Windham lived with prosopagnosia, a condition sometimes called face blindness that made it difficult for him to recognize the people he met. Rather than retreat from portraiture, he leaned into it, producing hundreds of invented face collages over the course of his career. The faces he created were not attempts to capture a specific person's likeness; they were constructions, assembled from colored paper and imagination. In a sense, he was building faces the way the rest of us recognize them: piece by piece, feature by feature, until something recognizable emerges from the whole.
That compulsion is at the heart of "Homage to Howard Windham," an exhibition opening September 5 at Imago Gallery and running through September 26. The show brings together Windham's own work from the 1960s through the 2020s, alongside pieces by his daughter Brett Day Windham, his son Corey Turner Windham, and more than twenty of the gallery's exhibiting artists. It is, in the words of the Imago Foundation for the Arts, a look back at the through lines that connect a father's decades of making to the work of his first- and third-born children.
Those through lines are visible almost immediately. Windham's signature grids, dots, and lines recur throughout his decades of work, a visual language that referenced the aphorism that great forms can be constructed from the most minuscule of building blocks. His son Corey, who spent twenty-eight years as an itinerant visual design educator teaching thousands of K-4 students in Massachusetts, remembers watching his father at work as a child. "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 returning to the grid, making a series of acrylic paintings that echoed the colored pencil and watercolor grids in his own earlier sketchbooks.
Brett Day Windham, the artist daughter, took a different path. A multidisciplinary artist with an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, she works primarily with cyanotype. Her hand-painted cyanotypes combine photographs, paintings on paper, and what she calls "objectless sculpture," organizing collections of natural, commercial, and industrial remnants into works that evoke mysticism and ritual. Her piece "Poseidon," a 20 by 30 inch cyanotype and watercolor on paper, will be among the works on view.
Howard Windham's own path to the gallery walls of New England began at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was a graduate, and continued at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where he completed his MFA. He went on to teach studio art at UMass Dartmouth, where he also served as dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts. He retired as professor emeritus, but his influence extended far beyond the classroom. A former colleague at UMass Dartmouth remembered him on LinkedIn as "a professor, artist, and mentor" whose "guidance, inspiration and wit" benefited all who passed through the doors of the university's Group 6 design studio.
Windham's connection to Imago ran deep. He shared a 2017 show with fellow artist Lenny Rumpler, and in 2024 he was the featured artist in "Misadventure with the Muse," a show that also included guests Carol Wiseman and Olivia R. Watson. He also taught collage workshops at the gallery, including a 2024 father-daughter session with Brett called "Face the Music."
Imago is a non-profit organization run by artists for artists, whose mission is to inspire creativity and promote art-making that enriches communities. The gallery has become a fixture of Warren's small but vibrant arts scene, hosting exhibitions and art talks.
The September exhibition will include works by Imago's exhibiting artists, among them 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. The complimentary reception on Saturday, September 5, from 5 to 8 p.m., will feature music by Bob Drouin and Josh Cain and, as the announcement notes, "Howard's favorite chocolate chip cookies."
For those who knew Windham, the exhibition is a chance to remember a man whose work was whimsical, highly literate, colorful, and delightfully eccentric. For those who did not, it is an introduction to an artist who spent a lifetime building worlds from the smallest possible pieces, and who, despite a condition that made faces hard to recognize, made hundreds of them with his own hands. The faces he invented were never meant to be anyone in particular. They were simply faces, assembled with care, one dot at a time.