For Mildred Howard, There’s No Time Like the Present

Mildred Howard is up to something. The legendary Bay Area artist, who was born in San Francisco in 1945, has organized three concurrent exhibitions of her work on both sides of the Bay under the title Collaborating With the Muses Part One. The work comes from the last two decades, and includes sculpture, photography and performance. But this is just the start of Howard’s vision for a resurgence in an art scene she’s participated in for decades, mostly as a cornerstone.

“I was talking with a friend and saying that I should just have my own quote, unquote biennale,” Howard says. “Since I work in a variety of media I wanted to showcase that.”

Locals will likely know Howard from her many public art commissions: a wall of blue glass on the Fillmore Street Bridge, featuring a poem by Quincy Troupe celebrating San Francisco’s jazz history; a large-scale gilded frame accentuating the industrial beauty of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard; 130 saxophones trumpeting an ode to Dizzy Gillespie at San Francisco International Airport; a question mark guarding the entrance to the San Leandro Public Library.

People may also know her from Pam Uzzell’s 2018 documentary Welcome to the Neighborhood which illustrated how gentrification could threaten the livelihood of even an artist as entrenched in the Bay Area as Howard. Her mother, Mable Howard, famously sued BART in 1968, forcing underground the train line that traveled through South Berkeley, preventing the destruction of her neighborhood. Then, nearly 50 years later in 2016, Mildred Howard was priced out of her Berkeley home.

But Howard hasn’t turned her back on the Bay Area, as the now-Oakland resident’s latest run of exhibitions attest. In shows in San Francisco and Oakland she showcases not only a number of artistic approaches to her brand of conceptual art, but a constellation of influences, including literature, music and the art community itself.

Anglim/Trimble, in Dogpatch, presents The Time and Space of Now: Moving Stills, a selection of photographic prints Howard created in collaboration with Magnolia Editions, who the artist has worked with since the late 1970s. The images, printed on scraps of wallpaper, are diffuse and shadowy stills from films Howard made when she was a teenager, documenting a trip to meet her relatives in the American South, shot on an 8mm film camera. There’s also an electric toy train making rounds on an oval track, its cars bearing the names of places from Baltimore to Fruitvale and the Mission, furthering the theme of a journey.

“I was so fascinated by that camera and the possibility that I could make a movie,” Howard says. “It was the vastness of those images that got to me.”

But this possibility, like many teenage flights of fancy, was soon forgotten. In 2021, Howard discovered the films in her late mother’s alligator handbag. A bronze sculpture of that handbag, sprouting angelic wings, sits in the center of the gallery, amidst the prints. In addition to the prints, Howard collaborated with Uzzell on a short film which debuted as part of Howard’s 2022 exhibition The Time and Space of Now at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.

Selected sculptures from that ICA San José show are on view at 500 Capp Street, the Mission District arts foundation in the former home of David Ireland, an influential conceptual artist — and Howard’s graduate advisor.

The most striking aspect of the Capp Street show is how seamlessly Howard’s work blends into the environment of Ireland’s home, filled with his own sculptural interventions. Howard’s taxidermy hen hovers above a mound of oyster shells in the living room; her frying pan with a tiny square mirror affixed to the bottom protrudes from a stool, facing an audience of empty chairs in a closet; her small plastic sculptures of a butler and maid stand on a silver serving tray placed atop the comforter in one of the bedrooms.

Just as Ireland blurred the line between his home and exhibition space, the embedded nature of Howard’s work within the house blurs the boundary between artwork and inspiration, muse and museum, artist and community.

The most wide-ranging entry in Collaborating With the Muses comes in the form of a group exhibition at Oakland’s pt.2 gallery, furthering the emphasis underlying all three shows of community as a muse. The exhibition includes paintings, photographs and sculptures by Howard’s influences and contemporaries Squeak Carnwath, Jay DeFeo, Viola Frey, Martha Shaw and Robert Therrien, as well as a handful of Howard’s own sculptures. These houses made from glass bottles are smaller versions of a recurring motif in the artist’s practice, luminous metaphors for the fragility of belonging and an apt reminder that home is what you make it.

The centerpiece of the show is a cream-colored Schimmel piano, set in an apparently empty room. Look closer, and you can see the musical score for Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece” applied with white vinyl to the gallery’s white walls, almost imperceptible. Performances are scheduled each weekend for the exhibition’s duration, featuring renowned jazz musicians Chris Brown, Jon Jang, Allison Lovejoy and Marcus Shelby.

The 1958 song is a roomy, two-chord progression, replete with rests. French composer Claude Debussy famously said that “music is the space between the notes.” Perhaps a similar case could be made for art.

Looking at art is to experience a synthesis of intent and interpretation, something that happens “between the notes.” It is a dissolution of ego, both on the part of artist and viewer, the product of which is inherently collaborative. Selflessness is central to Howard’s project: this “quote, unquote biennale” isn’t about her, but about her place within her larger artistic community, of which the viewers themselves are key figures.

Howard hopes that the dialogue will continue for years to come and extend beyond her personal practice. Collaborating with the Muses Part One is, as the titular qualifier implies, just the start of Howard’s plan.

“I’m doing part one and part two,” Howard says. “And hopefully in two or three years, someone will do part three, and four, and so on and take off running with it. It’s been quiet too long.”

Whether or not the project continues in the future, one thing is clear: Mildred Howard’s time is now.

‘Collaborating With the Muses Part One’ is on view at Anglim/Trimble (1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco), 500 Capp Street (San Francisco) and pt.2 gallery (1523 Webster St., Oakland), through Oct. 26, 2024.