California institutions exalted Junipero Serra while displacing Mildred Howard from Berkeley.
In a West Oakland warehouse, Howard keeps a ten-foot statue of the Spanish missionary bound and blindfolded, the colonizer-saint mummified in the exact “Make America Great Again” red she names. It is the newest work in her Untold Histories / Hidden Truths series. Isaiah warned against those who call dark light and light dark, and the long veneration of Serra was precisely that inversion. The church built a monument to a brutalization and called it a mission. Howard does not ask for polite reconsideration of a historical figure; she performs the unmasking. The sculpture strips away the myth of the benevolent priest and leaves only the record of the chain.
Howard was born in 1945, the youngest of ten, to dockworkers who became activists. Her mother, Mable “Mama” Howard, led the fight to tunnel BART underground through Berkeley rather than let the elevated tracks split their Black neighborhood. For half a century, the Howards lived within a few blocks of one another, a dense web of cousins and elders, of the kind of rootedness that makes a place more than property. “Houses hold memories,” Howard says. “They’re like vessels of information.” Her art has circled this truth for decades—glass bottle houses small enough to lift in a palm, bronze-cast work gloves, installations built from the scraps of a world that keeps getting torn down.
That neighborhood is gone now. The houses that held generations of life have been sold. The artist who spent years turning salvaged wood and old photographs into altars for the forgotten had to walk away from her own altar. In 2017, after nineteen years in a South Berkeley warehouse, her landlord doubled her rent. She could not stay. One by one, the family homes changed hands; the last of them was sold two years ago. The art world’s celebration of Mildred Howard arrives in the year her community was finally erased.
Amos 5:11 pronounces woe upon those who trample the poor and exact levies of grain. The contemporary real estate market is that prophetic text made visible, committing the structural violence of severing memory—leaving a Black family that lived within a four-block radius for fifty years to scatter while the market priced their history as a profit center.
The sudden recognition of her fifty-year career—the Guggenheim Fellowship, the archive at Berkeley, the retrospective at the Oakland Museum of California—is a gift, but it arrives against a backdrop of deliberate erasure. She applied for a Guggenheim again and again; after fifteen years of applications and fifteen years of rejections, the letter of acceptance finally arrived. She called the institution to verify it was real. Her archive has been acquired by the Bancroft Library. Only last month, a court had to stop the administration from shuttering an Indigenous exhibit at UC Berkeley—the very institution whose Bancroft Library has now absorbed Howard’s archive. The same cultural machinery that can erase a community can also claim to preserve its artifacts, and the machinery does not care which name you write in the program.
We who claim to stand for the dignity of the artist and the integrity of the community closed the gallery walls to Black makers and allowed the neighborhoods to clear, telling ourselves the market was neutral. The same displacement the city enacted through deregulation was enabled by a cultural passivity that refused to see the neighborhood as a human dignity question until it became a museum object. The command of Matthew 25 to honor the neighbor is clear. The gospel demands attention to the people who are pushed to the margins. But we praised the aesthetic without paying for the ground the artist stood on until the institution needed the narrative.
Pope Francis named the globalization of indifference that allows a city to look at a suffering community and see only a development corridor. He spoke of a society that has forgotten how to weep. Howard’s kitchens, her rolling pins, her glass houses, and her bound monument are the refusal of that indifference. They are the stubborn retention of memory in a town that trades in amnesia.
The retrospective opens June 12 and runs through October 18, 2026. In a corner of the museum, there will be a small wooden chair—the chair Howard sat in as a three-year-old at her first art class, in a South Berkeley church that is no longer standing. The chair holds the children who sat in it, the elders who kept it, the decades in which it was hurried out of a house before the keys were turned over. It is not large, but it carries what the country would rather forget.
Romero’s lineage teaches that truth is spoken in acts of unbinding. He ordered the repression to cease; Howard orders the lie to cease. A community does not recover its soul by placing a bound monument in a gallery; it recovers when it stops pricing its builders out of their own streets. The door of return remains open to a city that finally chooses to house the memory her glass vessels hold, rather than pricing its builders out of their own streets.