Aliza Stone Howard is a New York City painter whose focus on portraiture began with her senior thesis at Harvard, a series of paintings that explored the construction of femininity and the collective gestures of New York women. Howard is driven by the potential of external appearances, inhabited space and material belongings to access a person's nature. Her paintings of heavily styled women and pop culture icons, in particular, investigate the visual mechanisms that both connote distinct personalities and blur individual identity through repetition. Howard is especially interested in the temporal qualities of painting and plays on the notion that paintings immortalize their subjects by incorporating fleeting trends into her portraits, from passé film and television characters to items and articles of clothing that belong to a particular time period.