Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Installation, assemblage, sculpture, print, film
Website: parraschheijnen.com/artists/mildred-howard
Mildred Howard was born in 1945 in San Francisco and lives and works in West Oakland, in a former awning factory she has converted into her home and studio. She received her Associate of Arts degree and Certificate in Fashion Art from the College of Alameda in 1977, and her MFA from Fiberworks Center for the Textile Arts at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley in 1985. She has been represented by Anglim/Trimble Gallery in San Francisco for more than thirty years and by parrasch heijnen in Los Angeles. Her work is in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum, SFMOMA, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, LACMA, the San José Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Museum of Glass and Contemporary Art in Tacoma, among others. She has received a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lee Krasner Award (2015), the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2017), two Rockefeller Fellowships to Bellagio (1996 and 2007), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2004/5), a NEA Fellowship in Sculpture, and the Adaline Kent Award from the San Francisco Art Institute (1991). In 2011 the City of Berkeley declared March 29 to be Mildred Howard Day.
Howard works in assemblage, installation, glass, fiber, photography, video, and public art, using common objects of daily life — glass bottles, silverware, butcher knives, domestic hardware, found photographs — as mediums in both senses of the word: artistic materials and intermediaries between the audience and their history. Her house sculptures, made from glass bottles, are among her most iconic works: architecturally referencing the bottle houses in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, they create spaces of memory, shelter, and loss. Her public works are embedded throughout the Bay Area — a wall of saxophones at SFO’s international terminal, blue glass panels etched with a Quincy Troupe poem on the Fillmore Street overpass, a giant question mark at the entrance to the San Leandro Public Library, a notched disk outside Ashby BART station. Her most recent work, Collaborating With The Muses (2024–2025), has reimagined monuments to historical figures complicit in the subjugation of enslaved people, Black Americans, and Indigenous communities. Her practice has been described by curator Peter Selz as “rich and evocative work… taking common objects of daily life and infusing them with the spark of meaning.”
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