The trains were the instrument of the great migration to California. Railroad tracks displaced people across the continent and into another era. . . . History and memory teach us to value the images of our past. Knowing that we made the journey, we can better understand why we are here. History tells us about the future and helps us to see where we are going.
Mildred Howard, “Last Train from Caney Creek to 16th and Wood,” artist statement (San Francisco: Capp Street Project, 1994).
Mildred Howard was born in San Francisco in 1945. Her family had moved from the farmland of southeast Texas during World War II to work in the Hunter’s Point shipyards. After the war, they moved to a predominantly Black neighborhood in South Berkeley. Describing herself as “part Panther and part flower child,”1 Howard grew up in the East Bay during the 1960s, studying art and ballet at the Oakland Museum of California and the South Berkeley Community Church. As part of an emerging community of Black artists and musicians, she earned her MFA in 1985 from the Fiberworks Center for the Textile Arts, which was affiliated with nearby John F. Kennedy University. Howard worked with tapestry and old family photographs in pursuit of carrying on her family’s legacy of activism and civic leadership. Her practice soon expanded to collage, sculpture, and installation, through which she found she could heighten the poetic and political register of historic objects and events.
Mildred Howard, in Judith Bettelheim, “A Beautiful Tree Has Deep Roots: Mildred Howard,” in Mildred Howard: Ten Little Children Standing in a Line (One Got Shot, And Then There Were Nine) (San Francisco: San Francisco Art Institute, 1991), 12. ↩︎
Growing up in South Berkeley with parents who were antique dealers and civic leaders, Mildred Howard recalls that, in addition to her toys, she played with pieces of wood and fragments of furniture, constructing assemblages even as a young child.1 In the tradition of her family, Howard collects objects from antique shops, flea markets, and eBay. She incorporates into her sculptures such items as Katanga crosses, used as currency in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; metal safe-deposit boxes; pressing combs; family photographs; and a washboard the artist bought because it had her last name on it—“I had thought about sending this to my friend Betye Saar but she is no longer using washboards in her work, so I hung onto it,” said the artist.2 In her series using window sashes, Howard transfered photographic family portraits onto window panes. Removed from their familial context, the portraits on glass straddle private and public spheres. Howard adorned their frames of weather-worn wood with buttons and cast-metal fasteners—objects the artist notes “open and close things,” a material metaphor for the act of remembering.3
Meredith Tromble, “A Conversation with Mildred Howard,” Artweek 24, no. 24 (December 16, 1993): 20. ↩︎
Sarah Trigg, Studio Life: Rituals, Collections, Tools, and Observations on the Artistic Practice (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2013), 176. ↩︎
Meredith Tromble, “A Conversation with Mildred Howard,” Artweek 24, no. 24 (December 16, 1993): 20. ↩︎
Through her work as an educator at the intersection of art and science at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Mildred Howard finds that “everything you need to know about a particular thing exists within that thing or object.”1 In her bottle houses—wood-framed shelters with walls made from stacked colored glass bottles—bottles are objects of metaphor, material history, and physical dispersal of light. When she made her first installation with the material, Memory Garden (1990), during an artist residency at Headlands Center for the Arts, Howard was developing teacher curriculum about the physics of light and color, investigating what happens when light passes through an object. She was also reading James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), which recounts the scene of a young boy digging up glass bottles that appear to be growing out of the ground—a familiar sight in the southern United States, where bottles are placed in yards and trees to keep bad spirits away. A house made of blue glass bottles, Abode: Sanctuary for the Familia(r) (1994) is based on Howard’s imagination of slave quarters. Here, translucent bottles are metaphors for the collection of memory and the history of slavery.
Mildred Howard, in Peter Selz, “Spirit and Matter: Conversation with Mildred Howard,” Sculpture 34, no. 10 (December 2015): 40. ↩︎
The artist’s hands have a powerful presence in the work of Mildred Howard. Touch is evident in her earliest collages, where tears, stitches, and intimately penned elements mark surfaces. In Switchin’ in the Kitchen: From Dakar to Detroit & the Mississippi Delta (2013), seamlessly cast bronze sculptures of the artist’s hands hold, spin, scrub, and extend from vintage vinyl records—including Billie Holiday’s I’ll Be Seeing You (Commadore, 1944) and Buddy Johnson’s It Was Swell Knowing You (Decca, 1947). They are intimate memorials, dedications to memories that the artist’s hands set in motion and reminders of an adage Howard’s friend, the artist David Ireland, once shared with her and that she now teaches her students: “If you don’t do anything, nothing happens.”1
Mildred Howard, in Peter Selz, “Spirit and Matter: Conversation with Mildred Howard,” Sculpture 34, no. 10 (December 2015): 42. ↩︎
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