A self-taught painter, Raymond Howell was able to support himself as a full-time artist by age 30. Howell had been a longtime fixture in the Bay Area art scene. In the mid-1960s he opened Art Associates West, a gallery and art school in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, which operated for nearly a decade. Howell's 1965 painting The Brown Family was shown at the opening of the Oakland Museum in the Black Perspective exhibition, and was later purchased for the museum collection. He had numerous solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Provincetown, and in 1999 Stanford University presented a 40-year retrospective of his paintings.
