Sculptor, welder, custom metal fabricator, and foreman — for architects, artists, designers, and private clients. From Bourgeois to SpaceX, the work passes through the shop.
A three-story, multi-tiered staircase and landings for the Ermenegildo Zegna flagship store, New York City.
Mirror-polished stainless steel, bronze, and white oak. Led a crew of welders, fabricators, and riggers across six months of fabrication and on-site installation.
Ten years as Louise Bourgeois's personal fabricator — including Spider Couple (2002) and multiple Maman castings. Bourgeois brought him in on the strength of structural bronze and stainless steel welding certification. The work demanded joints that could carry the weight of the legs over time, outdoors, in public.
Lead fabricator and installer for Michelle Lopez's Blue Angels at the Bass Museum, exhibited during Art Basel: Miami. Mirror-polished stainless paired with enamel-coated aerospace aluminum — two materials that don't typically share a sculpture.
Lead welder and fabricator on Dennis Oppenheim's Engagement, commissioned for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Twin paired forms — stainless ring and stainless arch — each crowned by a glass-paneled diamond.
A drawing becomes a template. A template becomes a cut, a weld, a finish. The work carries its making in plain sight.
Each project begins with the architect, sculptor, or designer's intent — drawings, models, references. The studio translates that into buildable detail: materials, joinery, finishing, and a fabrication sequence that holds up in place.
Work is built in-shop across the full range of metalworking processes — forging, MIG and TIG welding, structural bronze welding, machining, casting integration, hand-finishing. Sculpture-scale, architectural-scale, and intimate alike.
Final installation is supervised in person, with rigging and on-site welding where the scale demands it. Patinas, finishes, and touch-ups are completed on location so the work reads correctly under the room's light.
Brent Howard is a sculptor, welder, custom metal fabricator, and foreman working with architects, sculptors, interior designers, and private collectors on commissioned metalwork. Two decades of work — including ten years as Louise Bourgeois's personal fabricator (Spider Couple, multiple Maman castings), sculpture fabrication for Dennis Oppenheim, Yoko Ono, Nari Ward, Michelle Lopez, Jac Leirner, Keith Tyson, and David Byrne, architectural metalwork for the Ermenegildo Zegna flagship and private NYC residences, and design commissions for Coach, ABC Carpet, Pembrooke & Ives, and DYAD.
Most recently, Welding Supervisor on the Starship launch tower build at SpaceX in Brownsville, Texas. The same hands that shape an artwork can hold a shop floor together.
For eleven years Brent taught and directed the wood and metal shops at the Yale School of Art, where he served as Sculpture Professor and Critic. That teaching practice continues to shape how the studio works — material literacy first, drawing as thinking, the bench as the place where ideas are tested.