Florence, Turin, Milan, walking museum after museum after museum. He spent summers there with his grandparents. Born and raised in Manhattan, in his youth he and his parents, both educators, routinely visited Italy, where his mother was born. And it may become the greatest memorial bronze of the modern age. Across five scenes and 38 larger-than-life-size human figures, it will be nearly 60 feet long and ten feet high. When complete, Howard’s immense frieze will tell the story of an American reluctantly answering the call to war-a deeply personal and individual story and the grand symbolic story of the nation all at once. And this sculpture, A Soldier’s Journey, years in the making, will serve as the centerpiece of the National World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C. While his tools and materials suggest Howard works in clay and bronze, his true medium is light. Light on every body-indifferent light, animating light, sanctifying light. Light gathering in the folds of the uniforms, washing the boot tops and the rifle barrels, radiant, hard as marble, soft as lambswool, painting the floors, drifting into the corners like snow, sleeping in the shadows.
Iron light, straw light, light bright as brass, sun-yellow light corkscrewing from the skylights to settle across every unfinished face and figure.
You see it sifting down from the ceiling and sneaking through the glass doors, cascading from the two big windows up front, the long room filled with it in every angle and on every surface, the whole place swelling with daylight pouring through the glass bricks out back. Not as some condition of simple illumination, but as the maker of solids, the hand, the hammer and the chisel, the creator. “Light is everything,” says the sculptor.