Printmaking Alumna Perri Lynch Howard Featured in Cascade PBS’s Art by Northwest
Cascade PBS profiled Cranbrook alumna Perri Lynch Howard (MFA Printmaking 2001) in its Art by Northwest series. The seventh episode of Season 3 and a companion article by arts editor Brangien Davis follow Howard’s work as a sound artist and painter in Twisp, Washington.
Howard’s sound wave paintings look like mountains reflected in water. She records natural soundscapes with a boom microphone in vulnerable ecosystems, from the Arctic Circle to Oregon, before climate change and human encroachment alter them. Back in the studio, she studies the recordings as oscillograms and spectrograms, maps them in a sketchbook in four-minute increments, and paints with a squeegee while listening to the audio. The results make up her ongoing Frequencies series.
In the Art by Northwest episode, Howard says, “As an artist, I think you just look for moments of sensitivity. You move through the world and see what lights you up. Listening lights me up in this way that it takes time and takes attention. And I always think of listening as a form of love. I really have that kind of connection with it. That’s what I’m interpreting visually.”
She also shared that her time at Cranbrook changed how she listens. She studied in the Printmaking (now Print Media) department at the Academy, and spent a great deal of time in Architecture, focusing on emphasis on sound as a spatial force. In Michigan’s dense forests, she met birders who identify species by ear rather than sight. “It opened a door for me in my awareness,” Howard says. “This new sensibility forever changed the way I perceive my surroundings, and the way I create my art.”
Howard grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts. She earned a BA at The Evergreen State College, where artist Joe Feddersen told her she painted like a printmaker, and a BFA at the University of Washington. After earning her MFA at Cranbrook, she returned to Seattle. About a decade ago, she moved to Twisp, near the road where she first wondered, as a teenager on an Outward Bound course, how she could live there and be an artist.
Her work has been shown in the United States, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, and Canada, as well as in the Arctic Circle. She is a Fulbright scholar who has completed projects in India, Portugal, Italy, Canada, and Brazil. Recent solo exhibitions include Overheard Underwater (2025) at the New Bedford Whaling Museum and Voice of the Land: A Quiet Cartography (2026) at The Confluence in Twisp in 2026. Her public artworks are in the Washington State Arts Commission collection.
Learn more:
