Artist Mildred Howard Changes Landscapes

SJMA’s 2022 Gala Honoree Mildred Howard is an artist of the world while living in Oakland. She creates art for the community out of everyday objects.

Mildred Howard is a beloved Bay Area artist, born in San Francisco in 1945 and raised in South Berkeley. Over the span of her long career, she has engaged in nuanced examinations of the history and politics of gender, race, and major contemporary issues including themes of home and belonging. San José Museum of Art has been a champion of Mildred’s work for two decades through exhibitions and acquisitions, including her major collection work Abode: Sanctuary for the Familia(r) (1994), most recently installed in the 2018 SJMA exhibition The House Imaginary. As Leah Ollman wrote in Art in America in 1998, “Howard has worked in assemblage, collage and installation for more than a decade, but her real medium is memory, which permeates her work with vitality and poignancy.”

She has received numerous awards for her critically acclaimed work, including the prestigious Lee Krasner Award in recognition of her lifetime of artistic achievement. She has also been the recipient of the Douglas G. MacAgy Distinguished Achievement Award at San Francisco Art Institute (2018), the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2017), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2004/5), a fellowship from the California Arts Council (2003), and the Adaline Kent Award from San Francisco Art Institute (1991).

Howard has exhibited throughout the United States and international art venues including Creative Time, New York; InSITE, San Diego, CA; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; New Museum, New York; City of Oakland, CA; and San Francisco Arts Commission and International Airport. Her works reside in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Glass and Contemporary Art, Tacoma, WA; Oakland Museum of California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and SJMA, among others.

Howard’s large-scale installations invoke both collective history and personal narrative. Her artwork Parenthetically Speaking, It’s Only a Figure of Speech, a series of punctuation marks rendered in opaque black and red glass and inspired by a poem by Quincy Troupe, was nominated for the 2013 Arte Laguna Prize in Sculpture, exhibited at the Arsenal Venezia in Venice. In addition, she has created public installation works in collaboration with poets and writers, including Three Shades of Blue (2003), in which lines by Quincy Troupe were etched into blue glass panels on Fillmore Street, and The Music of Language (2008), with San Francisco Poet Laureate Janice Mirikatani to render lines from her poetry on the building's exterior. Howard's Moving Richmond (2014), a work in which a poem by MacArthur Fellow Ishmael Reed was incised into two forty-foot walls of faceted steel, can be seen at Richmond, CA’s BART Station. Her eighteen-foot bronze tryptic Promissory Note (2022) was recently installed at the newly built Southeast Community Center in San Francisco.

Recently, Howard’s large-scale installation, The House That Will Not Pass for Any Color Than Its Own (2011), was on view along the promenade of Battery Park, facing the Statue of Liberty, sponsored by Battery Park City Authority. Her most recent exhibition is titled Poetic Justice, a group exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, with Judy Baca and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

As an educator and activist, Howard taught at major universities and art institutions including Stanford University, San Francisco Art Institute, Exploratorium Institute, and California College of Art; and lectured and served as a visiting artist at national and international universities.

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