From the outside, Mildred Howard’s home studio is unassuming, cradled in a crescent of streets in Oakland.
A man sits on a bench, waiting for the bus. A woman walking southbound offers a greeting, a soft “God bless you,” as she passes.
Climb one flight of stairs, and you ascend to another world.
Morning light filters through the gauzy curtains on the floor-to-ceiling windows. A tufted chaise rests on a zebra-print rug. An oversized pear perches atop a stack of books beneath a scarlet semicolon, part of Howard’s series of glass punctuation marks, metaphors for the passage of time.
Toward the back, at a table near a burnt-red wall, Howard is inspecting the contents of a box — one small part of her archive, recently acquired by The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.
She carefully turns over each piece: photographs of her family and her travels, newspaper clippings, letters, and fragments of unfinished artworks — a needlework project on denim and a cutout photo of the late rapper and activist Tupac Shakur.
“There are so many stories behind so many pieces of paper,” Howard said.
The collection is a colorful patchwork chronicling a career spanning more than a half-century. Once processed and made available, it will offer students, scholars, and members of the public a never-before-seen look at the ideas, inspiration, methods, and memories of “a beautiful artist,” said Christine Hult-Lewis, Bancroft’s curator of pictorial collections.
“What we’re looking at in her archive are materials that help us understand who she is,” said Hult-Lewis, who oversaw the final stage of the acquisition. “It’s such an interesting cross section of mixed media — all the different pieces that go into the incredible hopper of Mildred Howard’s mind.”
A portrait of the artist
Howard’s artistry can be traced to her earliest years.
“I’ve always been interested in the creative process … and curious about the world,” she said in a recent interview. “It was always in me.”
Howard was born in San Francisco in 1945, the youngest of 10 siblings. Her parents were transplants from Galveston, Texas, her mother an antiques dealer and her father a longshoreman who helped with his wife’s business.
Some of the materials in Howard’s archive stretch back to before she was born, including photographs documenting the lives of her parents and grandparents in Texas. The images provide a rare look at a time and place underrepresented in the visual record. “People didn’t necessarily have photographic documentation of their lives back in the teens and ’20s and earlier,” Hult-Lewis said. “And it’s pretty amazing to see the faces that influenced and became part of her work.”
When Howard was young, her family moved to South Berkeley, the neighborhood where she spent most of her life. After graduating from Berkeley High School, she went on to study fashion at the College of Alameda and earn her Master of Fine Arts at John F. Kennedy University. The collection includes materials related to her work in fashion design as well as her master’s thesis.
Across her career, Howard has made meaning and memory her muses. She has worked in a range of styles and scales — from evocative photo collages to larger-than-life sculptures. For her assemblage pieces, she often relies on found objects, breathing new life into cast-off items salvaged from antique shops, thrift stores, and elsewhere.
Although the collection does not include large-scale artworks — “we’re not an art archive, per se,” Hult-Lewis said — it includes preparatory drawings and documentation that shine light on Howard’s process.
“These then get transformed into art pieces that call on her personal memory and her own family lineage, that relate to identity and borders and all sorts of big ideas, but are very much grounded in her life and her work,” she said.
The archive includes datebooks, exhibit announcements and catalogs, and sketches, including drawings of her bottle houses, inspired by the practice in the American South of using bottles in gardens to ward off bad spirits, and evoking ideas of division, justice, and freedom. The structures, as with Howard’s other works, reflect a singular artistic mind and a deep-rooted social consciousness.
“Art is one of the last forms of freedom of speech,” she said. “And we don’t want to lose it.”
For 1997’s Crossings, Howard arranged 4,000 porcelain eggs into a parallelogram in a room bathed in red and blue light. The array is anchored by a Rococo mirror, which places the viewer in a sea of white orbs. The installation is a visual articulation of the Middle Passage, the brutal — and often fatal — journey of millions of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. The archive includes dramatic black-and-white images of the piece, which premiered in Berkeley and was later exhibited in England and Egypt.
The archive also holds documentation of 2002’s Blackbird in a Red Sky (aka Fall of the Blood House), including magazine coverage and correspondence with the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, which exhibited the work. The outdoor installation featured a translucent red structure, reminiscent of the modest shacks inhabited by Southern migrant workers, and glass apples floating in a nearby reflecting pool.
Among Howard’s more recent works is 2024’s Delivered, Mable’s Promissory Note. The disk-shaped sculpture stands at the intersection of Adeline Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley, just south of the Ashby BART station. The piece conjures the legacy of Mable “Mama” Howard, the artist’s mother, and takes visual inspiration from West African currency, which was also worn as jewelry. In the 1960s, Mable Howard led the successful fight against the plan for an aboveground BART track that would’ve cut through South Berkeley, a largely African American neighborhood. “She said ‘No Berlin Wall in Berkeley,’” Howard recalled.
(Photo by Annette Hornischer)
Howard’s other public artworks include a giant, ornate picture frame, which pedestrians can walk through, in San Francisco’s Hunters Point neighborhood, and a large bronze question mark, aptly titled Curiosity, outside of the San Leandro Public Library. The archive includes correspondence, architectural renderings, notes, and documents that reveal how her large-scale public works were planned, created, funded, and approved.
“Mildred’s dozen-plus public art commissions reflect communities and their histories back to themselves with wit and imagination,” said Leigh Raiford, a professor of African American and African diaspora studies at UC Berkeley who has engaged Howard and her art in their instruction. “Taken together, I have come to understand Mildred’s work as profoundly concerned with how we value human life across difference, and an invitation to viewers to take stock of who and what and where we are, our commitments and our course of action.”
Before it becomes available, the collection will need to be processed and described, which can take a couple of years, Hult-Lewis said. Like Howard’s public art, the archive will be open to anyone who wants to see it, preserved for future generations in the city where she was raised and shaped as an artist.
“That’s the way it should be — that’s the way life should be,” Howard said. “It’s making the private public.”
Consciousness and creativity
In 2011, Tom Bates, then Berkeley’s mayor, declared March 29 of that year Mildred Howard Day.
But even as the city embraced Howard, deeper forces were working against her. In 2017, she was forced out of her South Berkeley home, swept out with the tide of gentrification — ever-increasing rents in a fast-changing neighborhood and city.
Howard’s work “refuses to deny the complexity of community,” said Raiford, who has lived in South Berkeley for more than 20 years.
“Mildred’s archive will be a vital resource to anyone interested in the history of the Black Bay Area (especially South Berkeley), in the rich art ecosystem of the area and the incredible challenges artists have endured here, and in how to craft a life of purpose and impact through art-making and community building,” they said.
In recent years, recognition has been stacking up. Howard was awarded honorary doctorates from California College of the Arts and California State University, East Bay. In 2025, she was honored with a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
Through the celebrations and setbacks, Howard, now 80, hasn’t stopped creating. Back at her studio, she walks through some of her works in progress: a life-size figure of a man peering into a mirror; a black globe sitting in a basketball hoop, its chainlike net made of tabs from soda cans; and a formation of large-scale white dominoes. “She’s still at the top of her game,” Hult-Lewis said.
On June 12, the Oakland Museum of California will open an exhibition dedicated to Howard and her art, including works that are new and yet to be seen. Titled Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, the exhibit is the first major museum retrospective devoted to the artist. Among the pieces in the exhibit are the large installations Crossings and Blackbird in a Red Sky (aka Fall of the Blood House), along with materials from Howard’s archive, which will ultimately come to Bancroft.
“She has been working for a really long time and making her mark,” Hult-Lewis said. “And as is often the case with artists, sometimes their main recognition comes a bit later in their careers.
“This is really Mildred’s time.”