glass bottle houses<\/a> (2021-2024), she continually returns to the form.<\/p>\n\u201cHouses hold memories. They\u2019re like vessels of information,\u201d says Howard.<\/p>\n
Howard was heartbroken to leave her South Berkeley home and studio, but her vast network of friends and fellow artists wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s-dream of a kitchen, complete with ceiling-mounted pot racks and mobile prep islands made from rolling steel workbenches topped in white quartz.<\/p>\n
The artist Mildred Howard\u2019s Oakland living room. Photograph: Maren Caruso<\/p>\n
\u201cCooking for me is just as creative as making art,\u201d 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. \u201cFood is a way of sharing love, and I put as much into that as I do into making work.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s personal orbit, including John Moore, Howard\u2019s longtime partner who died last year.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am always thinking about my work \u2013 even when I don\u2019t want to think about it, like when I go on vacation,\u201d says Howard. \u201cIt\u2019s not really separate from my life. It\u2019s part of who I am as a person.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mildred Howard, Untitled, 1979. Photograph: Ed Mumford\/Courtesy of parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why OCMA\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s not a strong division between her life and her work, it\u2019s all really intertwined,\u201d says Adams. \u201cI couldn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Erin Feher is a San Francisco\u2013based journalist specializing in culture, design, architecture, art, travel, fashion, food and lifestyle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The work of Oakland-based artist Mildred Howard, photographed here in her home, will be on display at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465418,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-465417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465417\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}