Alice Patricia "Pat" Howard

1937 - 2021

By Mike Sigov
Blade Staff Writer


Alice Patricia "Pat" Howard, an award-winning artist and community volunteer, died Sept. 30 in Parkcliffe Alzheimer's Community. She was 84.

John Howard, her younger son, said his mother had dementia.

Her works were widely exhibited locally and nationally, including a 1999 month-long solo exhibition in New York at the former OK Harris Works of Art gallery owned by the late Ivan Karp, who helped discover Andy Warhol.

Mostly portraits and abstract art, they included oils, pastels, and charcoal paintings, as well as sculptures in metal.

She received at least a dozen awards, including the 1994 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.

"Art tends to unite mankind and reveal the common nature that exists in everyone behind the facade of divisive doctrines, political ideologies, and religious beliefs. … My work represents the facades and barriers that stand in the way of freedom and equality," she once wrote in a cover letter for her resume.

"My paintings also symbolize the depersonalization of contemporary society and its corrosive effects; the decaying legacy of an industrial age with the accompanying exploitation of nature and people," she wrote. "These are the facades of rationalization and denial."

Mr. Howard described his mother as a creative and giving person who was passionate about art and education.

"The only thing she felt stronger about than art was education," Mr. Howard said. "... She loved to teach people how to read. ... She also had a thing about grammar and would correct us [her children] even as adults."

In the late 1990s, Mrs. Howard volunteered for area literacy programs to teach adults how to read.

In her earlier years, she modeled for charity fashion shows in Toledo from the 1950s through the 1990s, also as a volunteer.

Over the years, Mrs. Howard also helped her husband, Dick Howard, create architectural renderings for Howard Associates, an architectural firm he founded in Sylvania in the late 1950s.

She was born June 22, 1937, in Pontiac, Mich., to Helen and James Heaphy.

After her father's sudden death when she was 13, she moved to Lima, Ohio, her mother's hometown.

In 1955, she graduated from Lima St. Gerard High School, where she was awarded a full academic scholarship to the former Mary Manse College in Toledo, which she attended for at least a year before becoming the display artist for the former Lasalle's department store in Toledo.

In 1957, she married Richard "Dick" Howard. They raised five children together. He survives.

Mrs. Howard then was for a time "a stay-at-home mom with a serious art hobby," as she put it in the cover letter.

From 1973 to 1976, she took classes at the Toledo Museum of Art school of design.

In 1987, she enrolled at the former Lourdes College, from which she graduated magna cum laude in 1990, with a bachelor of arts degree with a double major - in fine art and religious studies.

She was preceded in death by her daughters, Elizabeth Howard and Margaret Howard.

Surviving are her husband of 64 years, Richard "Dick" Howard; daughter, Angela Reason; sons, Joseph, Edward and John Howard; 10 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

A celebration of life ceremony will be announced at a later date.

Arrangements are by Serenity Cremation Services, Taylor, Mich.

The family suggests tributes to Lourdes University.