Artwork from the Beck Memorial Archives

Deborah Howard is an Associate Professor and Head of Painting Program at the University of Denver. She has been teaching at the University of Denver since 1987. She holds and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in drawing and printmaking and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in painting and printmaking.

After a discussion on racial stereotypes and aging in a Figure Painting course Howard was teaching, she began to develop her Portraits of Child Holocaust Survivors project and settled on drawing as the media for the project. Howard has drawn and painted twenty-five people who escaped, hid or survived concentration camps during the Jewish Holocaust of WWII. In 2018, Howard donated the portraits to the Beck Archives. View them here.