In her paintings and drawings, Donna Howell-Sickles has used the image of the cowgirl and taken it beyond the constraints of portraiture. In 1972 Howell-Sickles earned her BFA at Texas Tech in Lubbock and has been creating a career in  the Western Art genre ever since. 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.