Garry S. Howard's father was a rocket scientist and his mother was an educator, engineer, and artist. He had an older brother and younger sister. 

Garry was trained in graphic arts, plaster, clay, and ink. He became familiar with architecture, mechanical drawing, blueprints, and construction at age 14. He was exposed to music and learned to play and teach the guitar at age 15. He was the first person in Los Angeles to paint addresses on curbs as a business, and this helped him pay for college.  He worked in a garment factory and outlet store in his college town.  After graduating, he received training at law school and computer science and engineering at a Los Angeles vocational school. In his career in IT, he designed some of the largest banking networks in the U.S., became the first to attach a light pen to the IBM PC, and authored the first trade book on IT Security ("Introduction to Internet Security"). 

Garry S. Howard began to compose classical music in the 1980s and began producing and editing video content in 1998 when he founded a company that offered software to stream and sell video, audio, documents, and images.

In 2020, he performed research on how murals and other art projects were transforming cities around the world, attracting commerce and tourism, and helping unknown artists become famous and successful. 

In 2024, he noticed that although there was a high demand for sculptures, there were very few artists or retailers offering original sculptures. He also noticed a lack of art depicting underrepresented people in society.  

The Garry S. Howard Art Studio Project aims to raise funds to enable the production of large quantities of consumer and collectible art, in the form of print media, ceramics, statues, and busts, to promote the use of murals to enhance communities, tourism, inclusion, high moral and commerce, employment, and aesthetic beauty.