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 Mill Brook Gallery & Sculpture Garden, and has shown with Chase’s Garage, 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 teaches classes and workshops in painting, printmaking and drawing. Since 2020, he has taught at AVA Gallery & Art Center, where he also coordinates an outreach program called ArtReach, which provides weekly free artist demonstrations and studio visits with artists across the region.

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. In 2021, he co-curated SALON 2021, an exhibition that inlcluded over 140 artists, and hundreds of works that explored the diversity of makers in the region. He has plans for future satellite projects and exhibition spaces.

When not in his studio, he’s likely wandering the coast or the White Mountains.