Howard N. Cook

Howard Cook was born in Springfield Massachusetts in 1901. He moved to New York City in 1919 to attend the Art Students League where he studied under George Bridgman, Max Weber, Andrew Dasburg and Joseph Pennell. During school, he worked painting outdoor billboards and in lithography and photo-engraving shops. By 1922 he was creating woodcuts and drawings for illustrations for magazines including Atlantic Monthly and Forum. He traveled extensively for those assignments and it was a commission from Forum magazine to illustrate Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop that brought Cook to New Mexico in 1926. In Taos, he met the artist Barbara Latham whom he married in 1927. They lived for a time in New York. Cook produced murals for courthouses and the San Antonio post office as part of the New Deal. During WWII, Cook served in the Navy in the South Pacific as an artist-war correspondent. Cook and Latham settled in Talpa, New Mexico in the late 1930s. Cook was the first Artist-in-Residence at the Roswell Museum and Art Center in 1967 and the couple moved to Roswell, New Mexico in 1973. In 1976, the couple moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico after Cook was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He died in 1980.