Norma Howard

Norma "Nana" Howard (1958–2024) was a Choctaw Nation artist from Stigler, Oklahoma, who painted genre scenes of children playing, women working in fields, and other images inspired by family stories and Choctaw life. Howard won her first art award at the 1995 Red Earth Native American Cultural Festival in Oklahoma City. Her work is popular with collectors and critics.

Early life Howard was a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and was of Chickasaw and Mississippi Choctaw descent. She grew up in a small, rural Oklahoma community. Her family was poor and her parents struggled to raise their eight children.

Howard's maternal grandmother had come to Oklahoma from Mississippi in the early 20th century as part of the second removal along the Choctaw Trail of Tears. Her grandmother spoke Choctaw, not English, and would sometimes tell the children stories in Choctaw. Howard's father's family had come to Indian Territory earlier, during the first removal, and at first settled in the Atoka area. Later her grandfather decided to move his family to Stigler, Oklahoma, where there were better schools. There they owned land and grew cotton.

Howard recalled drawing on anything she could: with a stick in the dirt, on brown paper bags, even on pages of an encyclopedia.

Her parents were proud of her art. Her father, a house painter, carried some of her drawings in his wallet. Using cheap paint palettes available at the local general store, Howard taught herself to paint. Once her father even took off a day of work to show her paintings at a local event. In 1974 people at a gift shop in Tahlequah "laughed at my work, like they didn't want it." After Howard started her family and began working at a sewing factory, she didn't have much time to paint. Then the factory closed down, and Howard worried about finding another job. In a dream, she heard her late father say to her, "Paint. That's what you always wanted to do."

Early career Howard's husband David insisted they visit an art supply store in another town to buy her better paints and paper to use. David also pushed Howard to enter her work in the annual Red Earth art market in Oklahoma City.

Her painting Green Corn is in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while three more paintings hang in the Landmark Bank in Durant, Oklahoma. Since 2003, Howard has been represented by Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Awards and notable exhibitions 2015 Return from Exile: Contemporary Southeastern Indian Art, traveling exhibit 2014 Santa Fe Indian Market, Best of Classification III 2014 Southeastern Art Show and Market, Tishomingo, OK, Best of Division, 2-D Art 2013 Santa Fe Indian Market, Best of Classification III 2004 Trail of Tears Art Show, Cherokee Heritage Center, Park Hill, OK Grand Prize 1997+ Santa Fe Indian Market, Santa Fe, NM 1995 Red Earth Native Culture Festival, 1st place Watercolor, Oklahoma City, OK 1996 Red Earth Native Culture Festival, 1st place Watercolor, Oklahoma City, OK