Mildred Howard on her first retrospective in a major museum: ‘My art is part of who I am as a person’

The octogenarian artist has recently seen her star rise within the art world – now the Oakland Museum of California will exhibit works from her 50-year-long career

The artist Mildred Howard keeps Junipero Serra, the Spanish missionary who brutalized Native Americans throughout California, bound and blindfolded in her garage next to her black Mercedes.

The 10ft-tall sculpture is part of her Untold Histories / Hidden Truths series (2025), in which she recreates monuments to slaveholders and colonizers and wraps them in what she refers to as “Make America Great Again red”. Serra, symbolically mummified and holding his signature cross aloft, cuts a haunting figure in the dimly lit garage surrounded by U-Haul storage boxes, cans of paint and abandoned furniture.

The scene is emblematic of Howard’s home, a 15,000 sq ft warehouse in West Oakland that has served as her residence, art studio and archive for the past nine years. Inside, there’s little separation between the creative process and the art of living. A long wall of steel casement windows in the main room is colorblocked with blue and purple pieces of glass, samples and cast-offs from large-scale public artworks like Three Shades of Blue, (2003) in which Howard lined San Francisco’s Fillmore Street Bridge in blue glass etched with poetry, paying homage to the district’s jazz history. Until recently, her living room was punctuated by a pair of chest-high brass keys and a coffee-table-sized lock, extra castings from Locks and Keys For Harry Bridges, (2001) another public installation in San Francisco honoring the union organizer.

The spare lock and keys have a new temporary home at the Oakland Museum of California. Beginning 12 June, they will be on view to the public as part of Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, the first comprehensive retrospective of the octogenarian artist’s 50-year-long career.

“​​It’s the first retrospective for me in a major museum. You have to be almost dead for that to happen,” says Howard with a smirk. But the show hardly comes at a sunset moment for the still-working artist.

Over the past few years, Howard has seen her star rise swiftly within the art world. In 2023, she was presented with honorary doctorates from both California College of the Arts and California State University, East Bay. Earlier this year, her archive was acquired by the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. And in April 2025, after 15 years of applications – and 15 years of rejections – she was finally awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. She had become so accustomed to the rejections that when the letter arrived congratulating her, she had to pick up the phone and call the institution to verify it was real.

“It’s been an explosion of activity that’s really gratifying to see,” says Carin Adams, senior curator of art at OMCA. “There have been so many voices like Mildred’s that have been underappreciated, appreciated. I think that there’s been a concerted effort to make sure that we’re uplifting the voices we should be. It really does feel like she’s having a moment, and one that she’s deserved and waited for for a long time.”

Howard was born in 1945 in San Francisco, the youngest of 10 siblings. Her parents were dockworkers at the Hunter’s Point shipyards before launching an antiques business that they ran out of their South Berkeley home. In addition to being entrepreneurs, Howard’s parents were organizers and activists – her mother, Mable “Mama” Howard led the fight to tunnel the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) tracks underground through Berkeley, preventing further segregation and disenfranchisement of their predominantly Black neighborhood. Howard and her extended family called South Berkeley home for more than 50 years.

“We all lived within a four-block radius,” says Howard’s grandson and her longtime art assistant, Lamar “MYL3Z” Brown. “There was her house, and the house that she grew up in was around the corner. Three of her siblings owned houses. Uncle Frank’s house was a meeting hub for family members. I’d run around the corner to his house and I’d see ten cousins I’ve never met before mixed in with another ten that I interacted with daily.”

During that time, Howard lived and worked in a sprawling brick warehouse that was once the storage facility for South Berkeley Hardware. It was in part thanks to her grandmother’s activism that South Berkeley became an increasingly ever more desirable place to live. In 2017, after 19 years in the warehouse, Howard’s landlord notified her that he was doubling her rent. She had no choice but to move. Her family members’ individual stories varied, but their fates were ultimately the same.

“Everybody was there in South Berkeley up until about ten years ago,” recalls Brown. “The very last house that our family owned was sold two years ago.”

It is unsurprising that houses have been a long-running theme in Howard’s work. From her large-scale installation ​​Blackbird in a Red Sky (AKA Fall of the Blood House), (2005) a modernist shed-roofed structure made from red glass panels, to her series of doll-house-sized glass bottle houses (2021-2024), she continually returns to the form.

“Houses hold memories. They’re like vessels of information,” says Howard.

Howard was heartbroken to leave her South Berkeley home and studio, but her vast network of friends and fellow artists wouldn’t let her stray too far. Her friend Scott Atthowe, a renowned art handler, was the only one trusted with moving and installing some of the most unwieldy installations of the time, from a 60,000-pound Diego Rivera mural to a 10ft-tall Louise Bourgeois spider to Howard’s delicate glass houses. He had bought a collection of warehouses for art storage and offered Howard her current space in West Oakland, the former site of a canvas wholesaler. When she moved in she had to vacuum out decades-worth of fiber dust from the rafters.

But she quickly got to work making it her own, refinishing the floors, coating the walls, including 100-year-old brick, in bright white paint with bold pops of red throughout, and designing a chef’s-dream of a kitchen, complete with ceiling-mounted pot racks and mobile prep islands made from rolling steel workbenches topped in white quartz.

“Cooking for me is just as creative as making art,” says Howard, moving meditatively throughout her kitchen, chopping vegetables for a rich stock and sifting flour into a bowl for dumplings without missing a beat in the conversation. “Food is a way of sharing love, and I put as much into that as I do into making work.”

And as with so much in her life, the two often overlap. On her dining room table sits her sculpture Kiss the Cake, (2007) a pair of disembodied work gloves grasping a rolling pin, all cast in bronze. A mould of Howard’s own lips, painted ruby red, is planted atop the rolling pin. The table sits among dozens of other works: vintage photographs, paintings, sculpture and prints, all by artists in Howard’s personal orbit, including John Moore, Howard’s longtime partner who died last year.

The main warehouse space is divided almost directly down the middle, with a passthrough in the center. Ostensibly, one side for living, one side for making. But the actual boundaries are blurry.

“I am always thinking about my work – even when I don’t want to think about it, like when I go on vacation,” says Howard. “It’s not really separate from my life. It’s part of who I am as a person.”

That’s why OCMA’s curators spent so much time here in preparation for the retrospective, which runs through 18 October 2026. They studied the stacks and sketches on her shelves and combed through decades of photos and correspondence. They borrowed items that would help tell her story, such as a high school yearbook, Valentine’s cards from Moore, and a child-size wooden chair that Howard sat in as a toddler during her first art classes at a South Berkeley church.

“There’s not a strong division between her life and her work, it’s all really intertwined,” says Adams. “I couldn’t imagine doing an exhibition about her without trying to pull in some of that personal material to give people some insight into where the work comes from, and how she lives as a creative person every day.”

Erin Feher is a San Francisco–based journalist specializing in culture, design, architecture, art, travel, fashion, food and lifestyle.