Born in 1949 in Gainesville, Texas and raised on a 900-acre farming and ranching operation in Sivells Bend, she has always been close to nature and the land around her. In 1972 she earned her BFA at Texas Tech in Lubbock and embarked on a career in western art. In 2011 she was voted one of the 40 most prominent people in the Western Art world by Southwest Art Magazine. She was President of American Women Artists from 2000 to 2003, and an honored guest artist at both the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana.
Donna was chosen as the singular artist to create the 2019 artwork that will be featured in the collectible poster for the Pendleton Roundup in Pendleton, Oregon. The Rodeo began in 1916 with a featured artist each year, chosen for their proven history of authentically embodying the spirit of the western heritage in their work. Donna is the first woman artist to be selected for the honor of creating the poster artwork, and this year’s poster will be the first that prominently showcases all the glory a Cowgirl brings with her.
Donna Howell-Sickles has taken the image and idea of the cowgirl beyond charcoal lines and into reality. In the Western art genre, she has been exploring the layers beneath the Cowgirl’s engaging exterior for more than 40 years. Howell-Sickles herself identifies with the self-reliant and hard-working spirit of the cowgirl. In 2007 she was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame by the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas. Howell-Sickles’ work is a part of the art collections of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the Booth Western Art Museum, the Tucson Museum of Fine Art, Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West, the C.M. Russell Museum and the National Museum of Wildlife Art. They have energy, wit, wisdom and self-awareness. They have charm, style, independence and a love of animals that goes beyond the mythic. They are the cowgirls of Donna Howell-Sickles. It all started with a postcard. Howell-Sickles came upon a 40’s-era, hand- tinted postcard of a woman dressed in wild west gear astride a big sorrel horse above the inscription, “Greetings from a real cowgirl from the ol’ Southwest.” “This was a wonderful image in that the colors were printed over the black and white processing,” Howell-Sickles says. “And her bright red lips were printed just slightly off-center. That quality of the real and unreal fascinated me.”