The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) will stage a major retrospective for Bay Area artist Mildred Howard, opening next June.
Titled “Poetics of Memory,” the exhibition will bring together work from across five decades of Howard’s 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.
Howard’s history with OMCA extends even before the institution’s 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.
Related Articles
“I’ve had an ongoing relationship with the local museum for many years,” she told ARTnews in a recent phone interview. “I would go there as a child. I’ve taken students there. I’ve been in exhibitions there,” including “Global Elegies: Art & Ofrendas for the Dead” in 2003 and “30+ East Bay Painters and Artists” in 1996.
She added, “The exhibition being in the state that I live, in my community, that’s a real honor.”
OMCA also owns work by Howard, including her 1989 installation TAP: Investigation of Memory, 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.
TAP was initially conceived as a site-specific installation for the 1989 San Francisco Art Institute Annual, but it arrived to the museum’s collection with few instructions on how to adapt it for different sites. “That’s not, in and of itself, that unusual,” Adams told ARTnews “but 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—and have it come back to life in a new way.”
For Howard, she was especially appreciative of working with the museum’s 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. “That makes a difference when you have that kind of help and that kind of perfection—that’s why they have preparators,” she said, with a laugh.
Mildred Howard, Untitled, 1979.
Photo Ed Mumford/Courtesy of parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles
The 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. “As 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,” Adams said. “We really wanted to do something that would honor her role in the Bay Area arts scene.”
When Adams proposed a retrospective to Howard, the artist initially demurred because, she said, “I 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’ve done, the more I became interested.”
While TAP will not feature in the upcoming retrospective, two other installations—Blackbird in a Red Sky (aka Fall of the Blood House), from 2005, and Crossings, a 1997 piece that is being reconfigured for the 2026 exhibition—will. Howard said she was especially interested in bringing Blackbird in a Red Sky to the Bay Area because it has never been shown outside of Tacoma, Washington. Crossings 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 “30th Anniversary Exhibition” at the Berkeley Art Center.
Mildred Howard, Crossings, 1997, installation view at Berkeley Art Center.
Photo Lewis Watts/Courtesy The Mildred Howard Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
“Like a lot of Mildred’s work, there are the physical components [to the installation], but she’ll also frequently name the quality of light or the ambient atmosphere around installation as a material of the work,” Adams said. “So, we’re trying to figure out with her, what will that be for this version of it.”
In addition to these large-scale installations, “Poetics of Memory” 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.
The exhibition will also feature the sculptures from Howard’s recent “Collaborating with the Muses” 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, Junípero Serra, Peter Burnett, and William Gwin.
“It’s perfect for the time because art is being so threatened right now, and voices are being silent,” Howard said of that series. “But this is the perfect time to speak up and address those issues. It’s my way of addressing the world and its complexities.”
Mildred Howard, The History of the United States with a few Parts Missing, 2007.
Photo Ed Mumford/Courtesy parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles
Throughout her five-decade career, Howard has been extremely productive, and Adams said the exhibition’s checklist could be several times larger, if the museum had the space to accommodate it. “The 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,” the curator said.
During 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 “to see the way that different themes have circled around her practice over the course of many years, and it seems like now’s the time to make a connection between some of those themes.”
One of the most important themes to Howard’s work is memory. “She’s mining her family history, but she’s also making a clear connection to the African American experience,” Adams said. That led Howard and the museum to the exhibition’s title. “We landed on ‘Poetics of Memory’ because engagement with memory—personal memory, cultural memory, national memory—has been a consistent throughline of Mildred’s practice for over five decades. Those themes run through all her work, in a visual language that’s poetic, layered, and symbolic.”
