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Mildred Howard (born 1945) is an African-American artist known primarily for her sculptural Installation art and mixed-media assemblages.Baker, Kenneth, "Artist Intrigued by Interaction of Materials, Ability to Revise at Will" , San Francisco Chronicle Friday, February 9, 2007. Her work has been shown at galleries in Boston, Los Angeles and New York, internationally at venues in Berlin, Cairo, London, Paris, and Venice, and at institutions including the Oakland Museum of California, the de Young Museum, SFMOMA, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Museum of the African Diaspora. "Mildred Howard: Biography," Nielsen Gallery website. Retrieved April 2, 2013.Garchik, Leah, "Counting the ways to say 'I love you'", San Francisco Chronicle, March 24, 2011. Howard's work is held in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Ulrich Museum.
She received an Associate degree degree and Certificate in Fashion Arts from the College of Alameda in 1977. Howard continued her studies and received an MFA degree in 1985 from the Fiberworks Center from the Textile Arts at John F. Kennedy University that was located in Orinda, California.
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 Language on Glide Memorial's family housing building on Mason Street, both in San Francisco. "Glide Memorial," Art and Architecture SF. Retrieved April 2, 2013.
Howard's work has long dealt with themes of home and belonging. In 2017, a rent increase forced her to move out of the Berkeley (CA) studio where she had lived and worked for 18 years.Whiting, Sam, "Berkeley’s beloved homegrown artist Mildred Howard priced out", San Francisco Chronicle, January 6, 2017. This made themes of home all the more poignant in her work, and led her to deeper explorations of the effects of gentrification and displacement. Howard is not shy about incorporating activism or politics into her work, though she is conscious of the divide between art and activism. She states, "Changing is up to the people who look at my. I'm hoping they will feel something as a result of looking at the work... It's what the viewer and the spectator brings to the work."
Though Howard's pieces most often speak to broader social concerns, she occasionally incorporates autobiographical references into her work. Works such as Flying Low (2006) and Thirty-Eight Double Dee (1995) reference the death of her son. In her installation titled In the Line of Fire, she utilizes an old photograph of one of her own relatives to signify young soldiers of color in the early 20th century.
She has been the recipient of two Rockefeller Fellowships to Bellagio, Italy (1996 and 2007); the Joan Mitchell Award; an NEA Fellowship in Sculpture; and the Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Art. "Art of Social Change: Mildred Howard visits CSUMB Oct. 25" , CSU Monterey Bay website. Retrieved April 2, 2013.
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. "Mildred Howard Day, March 29", Magnolia Editions Blog, March 24, 2011. Retrieved April 2, 2013. In 2012, Howard received a SPUR Award, described as San Francisco's "largest and most prominent annual civic award", "Silver SPUR Luncheon" , SPUR website. Retrieved April 2, 2013. from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association.
In May 2023, Howard was awarded an Honorary degree Doctorate of Humane Letters by California State University, East Bay
In April 2025, Howard was announced as a Guggenheim Fellow.
Howard has also managed an art and communities program at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California, where she developed curriculum aimed at integrating art and science for elementary and middle school teachers. She 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 University Universities, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the California College of the Arts. "Mildred Howard", Joan Mitchell Foundation website. Retrieved April 2, 2013.Bulatskaya, Aleksandra, "Artist: Spotlight: Mildred Howard", Artious. Retrieved April 2, 2013.
In 2018, Mildred and her mother, Mable Howard, were the focus of a 26-minute documentary titled: Welcome to the Neighborhood, 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.
Art in America′s Leah Ollman writes:
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.Ollman, Leah, "Mildred Howard at Porter Troupe" , Art in America, March 1998.
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