Howard began her adult creative life as a dancer, before working in visual art. In the early 1980s, Howard's installations took the form of manipulated windows from storefronts and churches. They later evolved into constructed habitats that provided walk-in environments. For example, in 1990 Howard created a house made of engraved bottles and sand in the atrium of the Afro-American Museum in Los Angeles; this work was inspired by the book Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson and makes visual reference to the bottle houses that Johnson describes in the book. In 2005, she fabricated and installed a house made of red glass at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington. In 2019, Ms. Howard's work "TAP: Investigation of Memory" was exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California. The exhibit was a powerful multimedia installation that examines themes of identity, church culture, gentrification, dance, activism, and more. https://museumca.org/exhibit/mildred-howards-tap-investigation-memory Howard has created numerous public installation works in the Bay Area, including Three Shades of Blue, a collaboration with poet Quincy Troupe on the Fillmore Street bridge, and The Music of Languageon Glide Memorial's family housing building on Mason Street, both in San Francisco. In 2017, a rent increase forced her to move out of the Berkeley studio where she had lived and worked for 18 years.
Awards and honors
In 1991, Howard received the Adaline Kent Award from the San Francisco Art Institute for her installation Ten Little Children , a work representing a cemetery inspired by the Soweto massacre. She has been the recipient of two Rockefeller Fellowships to Bellagio, Italy ; the Joan Mitchell Award; an NEA Fellowship in Sculpture; and the Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Art. In 2011, Howard was honored at Berkeley City Hall Chambers where Berkeley mayor Tom Bates officially declared Tuesday, March 29, 2011 to be Mildred Howard Day. In 2012, Howard received a SPUR Award, described as San Francisco's "largest and most prominent annual civic award", from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association.
Other work
In the late 1990s, Howard was selected by Alice Waters to serve as executive director of The Edible Schoolyard, Waters's garden at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, which offered middle school-aged youth hands-on education in the garden and the kitchen with a focus on sustainable agriculture. Howard has also managed an art and communities program at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California, has worked at Alameda County Juvenile Hall and in various Bay Area jails, and has served as a cultural ambassador to Morocco, where she gave a series of lectures sponsored by the U.S. State Department. She has taught at Stanford and Brown Universities, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the California College of the Arts. In 2018, Mildred and her mother, Mable Howard, were the focus of a 26-minute documentary titled: , that examined the conditions surrounding an African-American family facing gentrification and a housing crisis that threatens South Berkeley's diversity.
Over the course of four decades, Mildred Howard has created rich and evocative work, taking common objects of daily life and infusing them with a spark that illuminates the underlying significance and historical weight of cultural forms. In freestanding sculptures, wall-mounted musings, graphic explorations, and representations of shelter, she has developed a language to address racism, injustice, need, and compassion. What sets her work apart from much politically engaged art is its grace and elegance.
Art critic Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle describes Howard's practice as follows:
Mildred Howard takes full advantage of the latitude that modernism won for artists in the use of materials and expressive idioms. She has used photographs, glass, architecture, housewares and other found objects of all kinds. Because she maneuvers so freely within the conceptually soft borders of 'installation' work, people tend to think of her as a sculptor, but she prefers the vaguer, more open term artist.
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.
