The Oakland Museum of California will unveil “Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory” on June 12, the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s 50-year career. The exhibition runs through October 18, 2026, and features sculptural works, public-art castings, and personal materials drawn from Howard’s home and studio in West Oakland.
Howard, born in 1945 in San Francisco, is the youngest of 10 siblings. Her parents were dockworkers at the Hunter’s Point shipyards who later launched an antiques business from their South Berkeley home. Her mother, Mable “Mama” Howard, led the fight to tunnel Bay Area Rapid Transit tracks underground through Berkeley, preventing further segregation of the predominantly Black neighborhood.
“Its the first retrospective for me in a major museum. You have to be almost dead for that to happen,” Howard told The Guardian with a smirk.
The show arrives at a moment of belated but swift recognition. In 2023, Howard received honorary doctorates from 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. In April 2025, after 15 years of applications and rejections, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship — news so unexpected that she called the institution to verify the letter was real.
“There have been so many voices like Mildred’s that have been underappreciated, appreciated,” said Carin Adams, senior curator of art at OMCA. “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.”
Houses have been a persistent theme in Howard’s work, from the large-scale installation “Blackbird in a Red Sky (AKA Fall of the Blood House)” — a modernist shed-roofed structure built from red glass panels — to a series of dollhouse-sized glass bottle houses.
“Houses hold memories. They’re like vessels of information,” Howard said.
Howard’s current home is a 15,000-square-foot warehouse in West Oakland that serves as both residence and studio. A 10-foot-tall sculpture from her “Untold Histories / Hidden Truths” series depicting Spanish missionary Junipero Serra — bound, blindfolded, and holding his cross aloft — sits in her garage alongside storage boxes and furniture. The piece is part of a series in which Howard recreates monuments to slaveholders and colonizers, wrapping them in what she calls “Make America Great Again red.”
The warehouse space is divided roughly between living and working areas, but Howard said the boundaries are intentionally blurry. “I am always thinking about my work — even when I don’t want to think about it, like when I go on vacation,” she said. “Its not really separate from my life. Its part of who I am as a person.”
OMCA curators spent extensive time in the space preparing for the exhibition, studying stacks, sketches, decades of photographs and correspondence. They borrowed items including a high school yearbook, Valentine’s cards from Howard’s longtime partner John Moore, who died last year, and a child-size wooden chair Howard sat in 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,” Adams said. “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.”
Howard moved to the West Oakland warehouse in 2017 after 19 years in a South Berkeley brick warehouse that had been the storage facility for South Berkeley Hardware. Her landlord doubled her rent and she had no choice but to leave. Her family members’ experiences were similar — the last house her family owned in the neighborhood was sold two years ago, according to her grandson and longtime art assistant, Lamar “MYL3Z” Brown.
“Everybody was there in South Berkeley up until about ten years ago,” Brown told The Guardian. “The very last house that our family owned was sold two years ago.”