Oakland, California
“Poetics of Memory,” Mildred Howard’s first major museum exhibition (on view through October 18, 2026), presents an expansive selection from more than five decades of work. Over the course of a long career, Howard has worked across media, though she is best known for her immersive installations, found-object sculptures, and public art projects. More a survey than a retrospective, “Poetics of Memory” is organized in a way that emphasizes the Bay Area artist’s lifelong focus on history, identity, and the Black experience, featuring new and previously unexhibited works, as well as archival materials from her studio, which shed light on the past events and lived experiences, both personal and collective, that have shaped her vision and practice.
Visitors first encounter a series of small galleries devoted to a non-chronological arrangement of mostly early- and mid-career works that demonstrate Howard’s ability to reimagine the ordinary and infuse it with significance. Presented near objects and images dating back to the 1970s, several immense bronze keys from Locks and Keys for Harry Bridges, a 2001 public artwork, for example, allude to access, labor, justice, and opportunity. Found-object sculptures like The History of the United States with a few Parts Missing (2007), made from altered books, call out omissions in dominant narratives. Howard’s iconic “bottle houses”—graceful skeletal frames tracing a traditional peaked roof, their walls filled with colored glass containers (a reference to the Black folk art tradition of bottle trees as a form of protection from malignant spirits)—have ranged from life-size, walk-in works to small tabletop sculptures. The example included in this area of the show, Black Has Always Been a Color (2024), pays homage to the eminent Oakland painter Raymond Saunders; the tiny bottles are a mix of black and dark green, with a single red one among the others.
Other assemblage pieces incorporate family photographs, antique frames, and a rich variety of found and made elements. A small room at the end of this section is meant to convey the atmosphere of Howard’s studio. Its red walls are hung salon-style with photographs interspersed with small sculptures and works-in-progress to create a cozy sense of warmth and home. Nearby, visitors can sit and watch a nine-minute video projection featuring several of Howard’s public artworks around the Bay Area.
Colors, particularly red and cobalt blue, have always played a significant, sometimes shifting role in Howard’s work. In the dramatic main gallery, which brings together two of her signature installations and examples from a new series of commissioned sculptures, red takes on a more ominous tone. At one end of the large, dimly lit space, Blackbird in a Red Sky (aka Fall of the Blood House) (2005), a “house” constructed of ruby-hued glass standing next to a shallow pool filled with rows of floating glass apples, uses transparency and reflection to frame an allegory of home. The structure—big enough to walk through, surrounded by its eerie glow—alludes to the modest shacks of migrant workers and enslaved people, while the color symbolizes the history of violence and targeted racial terror in the U.S. The apples, a reminder of the backbreaking reality of agricultural labor, inevitably recall the biblical punishment that follows the loss of innocence.
Three larger-than-life-size figures, also strikingly red, anchor the main gallery: one at each end, the third in the center. Collectively titled Untold Histories / Hidden Truths (2025/26), these bronze statues mummified in layers of fabric represent a trio of contested 19th-century figures—Francis Scott Key, Senator William Gwin, and Peter Burnett—all of whom have been celebrated in American history despite their support of slavery and their often-brutal subjugation of Black, Indigenous, and Asian people. Other artists have toppled similar monuments; Howard skillfully shrouds these in fabric dyed a color sometimes described as “Make America Great Again Red,” which effectively silences them. It’s a powerful gesture, suggesting a kind of dark and feminist humor.
Crossings (1997), at the other end of the gallery from Blackbird in a Red Sky, operates in a similar vein, reflecting on potential and loss, cycles fulfilled and unfulfilled. Hundreds of porcelain eggs, bathed in a pinkish-red light, are arranged in perfect rows on a low plinth. A full-length mirror in an extravagant Rococo gilt frame allows viewers to see themselves conjoined with that expanse, Howard’s visualization of the millions of lives lost to the Middle Passage. Too many to count, the delicate eggs fill one’s field of vision—a subtly visceral reminder not only of the individual dead, but also of succeeding generations cut off through the deaths of mothers. The events of the past, Howard reminds us throughout her work, continue to influence the issues of race, culture, and civil rights that confront us today.
