For more than five decades, Mildred Howard has transformed everyday materials into meditations on memory, place, identity, and history. Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, on view through October 11 at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), is the first major museum survey to examine the breadth of that practice.
“It has been a great honor and privilege to provide this long-overdue time and space for celebrating the legacy of Mildred Howard,” writes director and CEO Lori Fogarty in the publication accompanying the exhibition.
Born in San Francisco in 1945, Howard was raised in nearby Berkeley, where she studied Afro-Haitian dance, designed and sold clothing, and began experimenting with collage and sculpture. Those early experiences shaped a multimedia practice that would become associated with a number of art movements, including West Coast conceptual art, Bay Area expressionism, funk art, and the Black Arts Movement.
Howard’s story is entwined with the Bay Area’s, from watching the rise of the Black Panther Party and the Third World Liberation Front to running in its creative circles with artists and writers such as Raymond Saunders, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Hung Liu, Betye Saar, and Ishmael Reed. With 16 public art installations across the region, senior curator Carin Adams says, “Mildred Howard is one of the most important living artists in the Bay Area. Her work is simultaneously poetic and political, personal and collective.”
Howard in 2025.
