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Mildred Howard’s Red-Tinted Retrospective Wows at OMCA

The acclaimed Bay Area artist’s skillful acts of juxtaposition are on full display in over five decades of work.

Installation view of 'Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory' at the Oakland Museum of California. (Christine Cueto)

In Mildred Howard’s hands, ordinary objects are transformed. A skillet, a hat block, a multitude of small green glass bottles — all have served as materials in Howard’s expansive, mostly sculptural practice. Through skillful acts of juxtaposition and isolation, Howard recontextualizes objects and images, questioning the power of some and amplifying the impact of others.

At the Oakland Museum of California, where her retrospective Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory is on view through Oct. 18, 2026, quotes from the artist pepper the walls. “How do you take something that’s used for one thing and repurpose it into an artwork of an entirely different meaning?” reads one section of vinyl text. “How can you expand your imagination and create a different way of looking?”

If you’re Howard, now 80, the answer seems to be: easily. Born in San Francisco in 1945, Howard has built an impressive body of work over the past 50-plus years, one that spans installation, prints, video and public art. She shows few signs of slowing down. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025. Her archive just entered the collection of UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.

At OMCA, certain symbols and imagery loop through the decades, evidence of an artist continually in dialogue with American history and her own previous work. The earliest piece in the show is a collaged self-portrait on a $100 bill from 1975; one of the newest is an installation of Moving Stills , footage she shot on 8mm as a teen.

Portrait of Mildred Howard in her Oakland studio, 2025.

As the exhibition progresses fairly chronologically, works get grander in scale, and finishes become more refined. The retrospective culminates in an evocative, expansive display of Howard’s large-scale installations. Crossings , from 1997, is an arrangement of ceramic eggs on a low, cobalt-blue plinth. A large gilded mirror sits in the corner behind. Lit in red, the meditative arrangement references the Middle Passage — the meticulously placed eggs can read as stand-ins for the precious bodies of kidnapped and transported people — while the mirror implicates and distorts a viewer’s own image.

Blackbird in a Red Sky (a.k.a. Fall of the Blood House) invites similar full-body participation. Visitors can pass through a framework “house” lined with red glass; the experience is something akin to submerging in redness. The structure butts up against a pool of water filled with floating, blown-glass apples, which cast an eerie, liquid reflection onto the wall above.

The unsettling vibe is compounded by monument-sized figures wrapped in red cloth: William Gwin (an early California senator), Peter Burnett (the first California governor) and Francis Scott Key (of “The Star Spangled Banner” fame). All three were enslavers. Originally displayed in the FOR-SITE show Black Gold: Stories Untold at Fort Point, the statues appear in OMCA’s moody darkness as if wrapped for storage. Their identifying features dissolve into fabric creases, their potency silenced.

Mildred Howard, ‘Untitled’ from the series ‘The Other Side,’ 2014.

There’s a real contrast between this large space and the exhibition’s opening corridor, which presents smaller-scale assemblages and works on paper. In this brightly lit zone, Bill Evans’ “ Peace Piece ” plays through speakers, setting a perfect pace for absorbing more detailed work.

At the meeting point of dark and light, at the show’s center, is a bright red room of photographs, printed ephemera, cards and objets d’art — a colorful evocation of Howard’s relationships, her studio and the combinatory practice that happens in that studio. Within this gallery are several prompts to scan QR codes and launch videos (on your personal devices) to hear Howard’s stories about the surrounding materials.

Skip the videos and you won’t hear Howard telling the story of the glass vase her mother gifted her on her 16th birthday. Or about the time she put live chickens into an art show. Or what it was like to grow up the youngest of 10 in a Berkeley home that was also an antiques shop. “When my friends came over they said, ‘God, you live in the olden days,’” she says in one video, explaining how accompanying her mother to auctions and estate sales helped her develop an eye for the objects she now uses in her work.

A display in the ‘Studio’ section of ‘Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory’ at OMCA.

Be forewarned: you cannot, as I planned to do, find these videos online later. Visitors are left with the option of staring at their phones in the middle of an art exhibition, or skipping this aspect of the show altogether, and therefore losing out on the only opportunity to hear Howard’s voice.

Poetics of Memory excels in so many ways. It gives a Bay Area artistic legend her much-deserved flowers; it represents the wide range of Howard’s practice; and it gives viewers the time and space to fully absorb a life’s work. I only wish it didn’t withhold from its audience, through the use of technology, so much valuable information — along with the artist herself.

‘ Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory ’ is on view at the Oakland Museum of California (1000 Oak St.) through Oct. 18, 2026.

The documentary ‘Memories in Motion: Selected Stories of Mildred Howard,’ directed by Lamar “MYL3Z” Brown and Delency Parham screens at OMCA on Wednesday, July 15, 10–11 a.m.