Bayou Artist | Sara Beth Howard

Article STARLA GATSON
Photographer KELLY MOORE CLARK

Sara Beth Howard isn’t just an artist; she’s an artist-activist, a title that makes perfect sense when you consider all the Lake Providence resident has been exposed to and experienced throughout her life. 

Howard’s interest in creativity and artistry didn’t come from an art classroom. Instead, it sparked from real-life experiences, like learning how to sew from her grandmother and watching buildings constructed at the masonry job sites she often accompanied her father to. The art class she took at her progressive high school in Arlington, Virginia, helped ignite the sparks set by her earlier experiences, like sewing with her grandmother or checking brickwork with her dad. 

“Our art room had a raised platform in the middle where our teacher, who had been a dancer, would do live figure drawing,” she recalls. “She’d have on dance garb, and it was really wonderful. It was something I hadn’t really experienced before. We would sit and do life drawings of each other. The community I found in that art room was a different side of my friends than I saw in academic settings. That had a tremendous impact on me.” 

Despite being majorly influenced by her high school art class, Howard had no plans to pursue art in college. International affairs piqued her interest, thanks to trips to the Church Center for the United Nations in New York that she’d taken with her Methodist church. 

“That’s where I learned about apartheid in South Africa,” Howard says. “I learned about Bishop Tutu, and I began to get a broader worldview. Also, growing up in Arlington right outside of Washington D.C. during the time after Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King, I saw the rage and the disillusionment of people after these beautiful progressive men had been killed. I was starting to sort of awaken politically, and going to those seminars in New York helped me see the ties between international and domestic events. South Africa and what I saw in the District of Columbia didn’t seem that different to me.” 

Fueled by her newfound interest in politics and foreign affairs, Howard enrolled at Barnard College in New York City and immersed herself in campus politics. Financial issues forced her to withdraw from the institution after three semesters. However, she remained in the Big Apple and began working in the film industry as a location manager. She was hired to work on the “Mississippi Burning” set, which brought her south, to Jackson, Mississippi.

Howard ultimately didn’t get a film credit for “Mississippi Burning,” — “I ended up leaving the job because there were things that I was being called on to do that were unconscionable to me,” she explains before adding, “[It’s] still a really powerful and good film. I was glad to have been associated with it.” However, her time in Mississippi didn’t leave her empty-handed. She met her husband in the state.

“I planned to come and do a feature film and finish it, but I didn’t get to finish the film, and I fell in love,” she says. “That was not supposed to happen, but God’s timing is perfect.” 

The pair stayed in Jackson together, and Howard, deciding to take a hiatus from films after her time on the “Mississippi Burning” set, took a job with a stained glass business. Eventually, though, she jumped back into the film industry when a company in New York known for its after-school specials called upon her to work for them. She and her husband left Mississippi and headed back north, where they stayed for three years. 

“When we said we were going to start a family, we decided to come back to Louisiana,” Howard says. The pair moved to her husband’s hometown, Lake Providence, to be close to family. “We came back, and I got to experience culture shock,” she says with a laugh. 

Howard spent her first few years in Lake Providence at home with babies. However, she wanted to become more involved with this community of which she was now a part. So, she became involved with the local Head Start program, drawn in by its impressive art programs. She started volunteering, despite having no formal training as an art educator. 

“I had leadership skills that made me feel comfortable sliding into those roles,” she shares, “so I started a little art program. We made papier mâché, and we did all the things.” 

When her children got older and needed her at home less, Howard decided to go back to school. She enrolled at the University of Louisiana Monroe, where her “deep dive into visual arts was kind of solidified,” and all the pieces of her life’s puzzle — making things, artistry, and activism — began coming together. 

As she worked toward her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, Howard was also pursuing a teaching certificate so she could teach in schools, which she’d later do in Arkansas, Ouachita Parish, and Lake Providence. 

“It was rigorous,” she says of her time in school, “but I loved it. I felt very privileged and excited to be able to be there. It was like a gift.” 

Besides teaching, Howard’s post-graduation activities include making and selling her work. Printmaking is her forte, she says, noting, “Every new print is sort of like a birth because you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get. You’re working within the parameters of a discipline, but temperature, humidity, all those things, come into play. Printmaking takes a certain kind of personality. You can’t be a perfectionist. You have to embrace the unknown and the fact that every print you make is not a piece of art you want to show anybody. But you will learn something every time, and that’s what I really enjoy about it.” 

Additionally, Howard has pioneered a program called Art for All Lake Providence — the activism component of the artist-activist title. Howard noticed that, besides the online fine arts survey courses students must take, neither Lake Providence’s private nor public high school offered formal art classes. Art for All strives to fill this gap by bringing visual arts activities to community events, exposing children to the arts and, hopefully, planting a seed of interest. 

So far, Lake Providence has embraced the organization, and Art for All has garnered the support of the local newspaper — “They’ve been so good about covering the events,” Howard gushes. “When I open up the paper and see a picture of [one of our events], it’s very gratifying.” — and the trust of the parish’s school board.

“We’re welcome in the schools, and that was a huge step because they’re so pressed for time and test-driven,” Howard explains. “Getting that access had to be earned. They had to learn of our intentions.” 

Those intentions are exactly what the organization’s name implies: to bring art to all. Howard is a firm believer that art education can change young people’s lives. She has seen it firsthand time and time again throughout her years as an art educator. And that part — the potential to spread a love for the arts to the next generation — is one of her favorite parts of her artist-activist duties. 

As she teaches, whether in a classroom, in her studio, or at an Art for All Lake Providence event, Howard tries to impart her personal philosophy to her students: Try — and if you fail? Try again. 

“What really excites me is presenting something to young people and seeing them get excited,” she says. “It’s those lightbulb moments and watching them gain confidence in their own skills and learn that failing is OK. So often, in school and academia, that is not the message, and it’s killing people’s souls.”

Howard goes on to say that sometimes, trying yields pieces you might not necessarily ever want to show. But when you keep at it, she says, you’ll eventually end up with something beautiful that doesn’t just speak to you but to someone else, too.

“The act of someone enjoying something that you created, I think, is what kind of keeps me going,” Howard shares. “I’m not a master of all the things that I enjoy doing, but I enjoy them. And as long as I’m enjoying it, I hope I can keep doing it.”