{"id":37790,"date":"2025-12-18T00:17:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T00:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/bay-area-artist-mildred-howard-to-receive-major-retrospective-at-oakland-museum-of-california\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T00:17:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T00:17:07","slug":"bay-area-artist-mildred-howard-to-receive-major-retrospective-at-oakland-museum-of-california","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/bay-area-artist-mildred-howard-to-receive-major-retrospective-at-oakland-museum-of-california\/","title":{"rendered":"Bay Area Artist Mildred Howard to Receive Major Retrospective at Oakland Museum of\u00a0California"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tThe Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) will stage a major retrospective for Bay Area artist Mildred Howard, opening next June.<\/p>\n

\n\tTitled \u201cPoetics of Memory,\u201d the exhibition will bring together work from across five decades of Howard\u2019s career and will also debut new work by the octogenarian artist, who was awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. The retrospective will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, and the museum is working on a national tour for it.<\/p>\n

\n\tHoward\u2019s history with OMCA extends even before the institution\u2019s official founding in 1969, through a merger of an art museum, a history museum, and a natural sciences museum. She remembers visiting the Oakland Museum in her youth when it was still housed in the Camron-Stanford House directly on Lake Merritt.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve had an ongoing relationship with the local museum for many years,\u201d she told ARTnews<\/em> in a recent phone interview. \u201cI would go there as a child. I\u2019ve taken students there. I\u2019ve been in exhibitions there,\u201d including \u201cGlobal Elegies: Art & Ofrendas for the Dead\u201d in 2003 and \u201c30+ East Bay Painters and Artists\u201d in 1996.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe added, \u201cThe exhibition being in the state that I live, in my community, that\u2019s a real honor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOMCA also owns work by Howard, including her 1989 installation TAP: Investigation of Memory<\/em>, which features a field of metal taps, white tap shoes, a historic shoeshine stand, and an audio component. The museum reinstalled the work for an exhibition in 2019, which is when senior curator Carin Adams first worked with Howard.<\/p>\n

\n\tTAP<\/em> was initially conceived as a site-specific installation for the 1989 San Francisco Art Institute Annual, but it arrived to the museum\u2019s collection with few instructions on how to adapt it for different sites. \u201cThat\u2019s not, in and of itself, that unusual,\u201d Adams told ARTnews<\/em> \u201cbut it meant that we had to work for a long time with Mildred to figure out the best way to take care of the artwork\u2014and have it come back to life in a new way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Howard, she was especially appreciative of working with the museum\u2019s preparators to reinstall the work because when she had first realized it in 1989, she had affixed the thousands of taps to the floor herself. \u201cThat makes a difference when you have that kind of help and that kind of perfection\u2014that\u2019s why they have preparators,\u201d she said, with a laugh.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Untitled,<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>

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\t\t\t\t\tMildred Howard, Untitled, 1979. <\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Ed Mumford\/Courtesy of parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThe planning for that exhibition took about six years and it got Adams to thinking about how the museum could continue its long history with Howard. \u201cAs a curator, I started thinking seriously about what kind of role we could have in cementing her legacy when she and I began work on reinstalling TAP<\/em>,\u201d Adams said. \u201cWe really wanted to do something that would honor her role in the Bay Area arts scene.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Adams proposed a retrospective to Howard, the artist initially demurred because, she said, \u201cI was more interested at this point in showing work that had not been shown as much as some of my two-dimensional work. I was more interested in showing my installations because I think that provides a different way of thinking and a different way of looking and noticing. But then the more we talked, the more we discussed the range of work that I\u2019ve done, the more I became interested.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile TAP<\/em> will not feature in the upcoming retrospective, two other installations\u2014Blackbird in a Red Sky (aka Fall of the Blood House)<\/em>, from 2005, and Crossings<\/em>, a 1997 piece that is being reconfigured for the 2026 exhibition\u2014will. Howard said she was especially interested in bringing Blackbird in a Red Sky<\/em> to the Bay Area because it has never been shown outside of Tacoma, Washington. Crossings <\/em>has been exhibited from England to Cairo, but the last time it showed in the Bay Area was the year of its making, for the \u201c30th Anniversary Exhibition\u201d at the Berkeley Art Center.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Crossings,<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>

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\t\t\t\t\tMildred Howard, Crossings<\/em>, 1997,\u00a0installation view at Berkeley Art Center. <\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Lewis Watts\/Courtesy The Mildred Howard Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\t\u201cLike a lot of Mildred\u2019s work, there are the physical components [to the installation], but she\u2019ll also frequently name the quality of light or the ambient atmosphere around installation as a material of the work,\u201d Adams said. \u201cSo, we\u2019re trying to figure out with her, what will that be for this version of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn addition to these large-scale installations, \u201cPoetics of Memory\u201d will also feature smaller-scale works, from sculpture and assemblage to works on paper. Another large-scale work will be a new film, installed at 75-feet-wide, that includes footage shot when Howard traveled to the South with her mother when she was in high school.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe exhibition will also feature the sculptures from Howard\u2019s recent \u201cCollaborating with the Muses\u201d exhibition, which showed at 500 Capp Street and Fort Point in San Francisco. For that series, she wrapped monuments depicting four men who were advocates for slavery of Black and Indigenous people in California: Francis Scott Key, Jun\u00edpero Serra, Peter Burnett, and William Gwin.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s perfect for the time because art is being so threatened right now, and voices are being silent,\u201d Howard said of that series. \u201cBut this is the perfect time to speak up and address those issues. It\u2019s my way of addressing the world and its complexities.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>

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\t\t\t\t\tMildred Howard, The History of the United States with a few Parts Missing<\/em>, 2007.<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Ed Mumford\/Courtesy parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThroughout her five-decade career, Howard has been extremely productive, and Adams said the exhibition\u2019s checklist could be several times larger, if the museum had the space to accommodate it. \u201cThe challenge has been to make sure to highlight different moments [of her career] to help people feel the intensity of her practice without overwhelming them,\u201d the curator said.<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring the planning process for the exhibition, Howard has also been working on donating her archives to the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Adams has been involved with Howard as she has shifted through those materials. During that process, Adams said she has come \u201cto see the way that different themes have circled around her practice over the course of many years, and it seems like now\u2019s the time to make a connection between some of those themes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the most important themes to Howard\u2019s work is memory. \u201cShe\u2019s mining her family history, but she\u2019s also making a clear connection to the African American experience,\u201d Adams said. That led Howard and the museum to the exhibition\u2019s title. \u201cWe landed on \u2018Poetics of Memory\u2019 because engagement with memory\u2014personal memory, cultural memory, national memory\u2014has been a consistent throughline of Mildred\u2019s practice for over five decades. Those themes run through all her work, in a visual language that\u2019s poetic, layered, and symbolic.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) will stage a major retrospective for Bay Area artist Mildred Howard, opening next June. Titled \u201cPoetics of Memory,\u201d the exhibition will bring together work from across five decades of Howard\u2019s career and will also debut new work by the octogenarian artist, who was awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37791,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-art"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 19:13:08","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37790\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}