Biography

Memory is elusive, subjective, and fleeting. It is hard to pin down and difficult to communicate. But despite its slippery nature, artist Mildred Howard is compelled to incorporate recollections of the past into artworks that resonate with emotion and intellect. Drawing on a range of experiences both past and present, Howard challenges viewers to consider the ways in which personal histories are constructed and preserved. Her collages and installations explore the complex relationship between experience and memory, highlighting their ongoing exchange.

Howard, who was born in San Francisco, grew up in Berkeley in a supportive environment that was rich with tradition and cultural heritage. Her mother was an antiques dealer in south Berkeley and her father worked as a longshoreman by day and repaired and refinished furniture at night. As a child, Howard often assembled her parents’ discarded swatches of fabric, pieces of wood, and fragments of furniture into her own creations. In addition to running their antiques business, Howard’s parents were also politically active in their community. Consequently, Howard developed an awareness of contemporary political issues and creative possibilities. The artist recalls: “my early sense of what an artist was, what an artist did, was shaped by a Bay Area arts scene hovering between funk and conceptual art, craft and abstraction, surrealism and photographic realism. It was a time when artists made pictures from found objects and odd pieces of junk, where folk artists were worshipped, where natural materials were as common as paint.”1 Within this environment, Howard developed her own mode of expression and began to use varied materials in order to address issues of social and personal relevance. Although her style of working has changed over the course of her career, her themes have remained remarkably consistent. She continues to mediate between personal experience and collective cultural memory in order to address issues of history and identity.

In the early 1990s, Howard began to identify the house as a place of memory. Recognizing that the basic structure of the home could evoke a variety of associations, she expanded on the metaphor in order to create multivalent frames of reference that would explore the notion of the home as both a container of information and a symbol of stability and protection. Howard’s first bottle house, Memory Garden (1990), was inspired by a passage in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, about a man of African decent whose appearance allowed him to “pass” for white. He feared his secret would be discovered, but longed for a tangible connection to his past. In a passage about his earliest memories, Johnson describes a garden where colored glass bottles are stuck in the ground to ward off evil spirits. Recalling this tradition, Howard uses bottles in Abode: Sanctuary for the Familia(r) to build a repository for memory. Her use of glass bottles refers to African-American heritage, but also speaks directly to the fragility of human relationships. Abode is loosely based on the “shotgun” houses of African-American slaves in the South, which were patched together from scraps and leftovers. While her repetitious use of bottles may call to mind the duplication employed by pop artist Andy Warhol in Green Coca-Cola Bottles (1962), Howard’s bottles engage a very personal viewpoint. She uses ordinary household items in order to emphasize that the familiar objects of our lives should be treasured and protected like our familial and cultural memories and histories. The title of the work reinforces this idea by intertwining the Spanish word for “family,” familia, with the word “familiar.” As suggested by the title, the building resembles a home—a place where relationships are built and memories are accumulated—and a sanctuary, an environment for reflection and contemplation. ABODE therefore becomes a sacred space in which visitors are compelled to reconcile their cultural history with their collective and individual memories. —L.W.

1. Artist’s statement, 2003.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

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