Mildred Howard at Richmond Art Center: Wide range of moods
By Kenneth Baker, Friday April 17
“Spirit and Matter,” Berkeley artist Mildred Howard’s retrospective at the Richmond Art Center, comes at an unhappily timely moment. Recent events have forced mainstream media to pay unprecedented attention to the jeopardy that African Americans, especially men, face at the hands of the criminal justice system. The backbeat of social injustice has always made itself felt in Howard’s art, though she has seldom let social concern outweigh the specifics of viewers’ encounter with artworks’ at-hand reality.
Howard has studded two walls of the corridor entrance to the Richmond Art Center with embedded shell casings in floor-to-ceiling grids to form an installation titled “Ten Little Children Standing in a Line, One Got Shot and Then There Were Nine” (2015).
Mildred Howard sat down with Sean Pyles from Radio Free Richmond for a casual one-on-one interview. We love the conversation that emerged!
You’ll have an opportunity to meet Mildred Howard during an upcoming talk Don Farnsworth – Magnifying Magnolia and Mildred on Sunday, April 19 from 2 – 3:30pm. This will be a great opportunity to hear about Don’s methods and experiences working with artist Mildred Howard and see her 40 years of work in person!
A tall narrow house constructed from knives, an old photo of a black family scorched onto World War II bond papers, and bright red boxing gloves hung on the wall above a stool. These are among the images in Mildred Howard’s new show at the Richmond Art Center.
Howard, a Bay Area artist who has shown her work around the world, focuses on everyday images and the memories they conjure. A house is not just a house —it is a beacon for the hidden pains and historical burdens of African Americans.
Our first Saturday bilingual See & Make Art Tours are a favorite part of our month! We love opening our doors to new (and returning) families and kids, showing them the art in our galleries, hearing what they think and inspiring them to create art during a hands-on activity. Last month we were lucky to have Malcolm Marshall of the Richmond Pulse as one of our guests. He shares his experience in the April edition of the paper and online.
We hope you’ll stop by this Saturday, April 4 or on May 2 for one of our free tours, which are designed so the whole family can take part. Please meet the group at 3:00 pm in the Madeline F. Whittlesey Community Room at the Richmond Public Library, Main Branch (325 Civic Center Plaza) and we’ll walk as a group over to the Art Center.
Children and families explored their creative spirits together by seeing and making art at a bilingual art tour hosted by the Richmond Art Center March 7.
Lauren Ari, a teacher at the art center, led the group of about 10 on a guided tour of the center’s galleries, along with a hands-on art-making activity. Children’s ages ranged from 3 to 8.
KQED Arts is a phenomenal resource for educators, parents and art-loving folks of the Bay Area, so you can imagine how honored we were when writer Kristin Farr covered our 50th Annual WCCUSD Student Show as a part of Arts Education Month.
We think this article perfectly caps off a great month of arts education coverage — thanks KQED Arts!
We hope you will come celebrate with these students and their families during our special reception on Thursday, April 23 from 5 – 7 pm.
Since moving into their custom-made facility in 1951, the Richmond Art Center has offered art classes for all ages and held regular exhibitions. And since 1965, the Center’s annual student art exhibition has given young East Bay artists the chance to show their work in a professional space and inspire the Richmond Art Center community.
This year, celebrating its 50th anniversary, the student exhibition features work by over 200 students, as well as that of returning students and faculty.
As the Art Center’s Teri Gardiner explains — addressing the Art Center’s long-term commitment to young people — founder Hazel Salmi believed that an artist lies within everyone. “The exhibition celebrates and showcases the students’ creativity,” Gardiner says, “and the important role that art plays in education.”
The SF Chronicle featured our exhibition Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter on the cover of the Datebook. Writer Jesse Hamlin stopped by the Richmond Art Center to preview this four-decade survey and to speak with Berkeley artist Mildred Howard.
We hope you will join us for one of the many public programs associated with this exhibition. This solo exhibition runs through May 24.
Mildred Howard plunged about 130 butcher knives into a wall at the Richmond Art Center, where her 2005 installation “Safe House” is being re-created for “Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter,” a four-decade survey of the Berkeley artist’s provocative and poetic work that opens Sunday, March 22.
The piece, originally created for the opening of San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, juxtaposes the knives with a metal-framed, house-like structure whose floor is covered with silver and silver-plated domestic objects — chandeliers, platters, creamers, teapots — that go from polished to tarnished. It’s one of a series of pieces exploring the notion of “home” that the prolific assemblage and installation artist has made over the past 20 years, in addition to creating wry smaller-scale sculptures, graphic work and big civic projects such as “Three Shades of Blue” — a series of blue glass panels on the Fillmore Street bridge over Geary Boulevard, etched with a jazz-themed poem by Quincy Troupe — and the “Salty Peanuts” sculpture at San Francisco International Airport, composed of 130 saxophones.
We were thrilled when the Contra Costa Times wanted to feature artist Julee Richardson, whose work appears in the 19th Annual The Art of Living Black exhibition.
Julee is reflective of so many artists and creative people that exhibit in our galleries or take our classes — her diverse and varied background, her appetite for creativity and lifelong learning and her desire to show and talk about her work. We love the unique community of people who walk through our doors!
Don’t miss your chance to see Julee’s work; The Art of Living Black closes on Friday, February 27, 2015.
Sculpture artist and sociology educator Julee Richardson is a scholar for life.
Studying the penetrating grooves that divide societies, closely observant of wedge-like pleats that fold harmony and disharmony into living histories or analyzing how society shapes people and people shape society, Richardson has carved an unusual place for herself in the world.
“As a gerontologist studying the social science of aging, you can’t help but learn,” the 70-year-old retired educator says in an interview.
Recently enrolled in a ceramics course at Los Medanos College where her art is on display in a students’ show, she is also preparing for an artist’s talk she’ll give from noon to 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 14 at the Richmond Art Center as part of the annual “The Art of Living Black” exhibit. Richardson is grateful a talent she largely abandoned for 20 years did not vanish.
The Art of Living Black exhibition has transformed our main gallery with the works of 75 Bay Area artists. Two of these artists, Yolanda Holley and Atiba Sylvia Thomas, sat down and talked with writer Lou Fancher on how this exhibition and their art are important for the community of artists that come together each year. The exhibition is up through February 27.
There are angry answers to questions about why the general public can easily remember the accomplishments of African American athletes and pop music stars, but forget people like Romare Bearden, (1911-1988), a brilliant writer and artist whose collages established him as a preeminent artist of the 20th century.
Locally, cries of complaint can be the reaction when visiting celebrities of color receive greater consideration than Bay Area artistic talent from the black community.
That void of attention was a driving force behind the creation and growing popularity of “The Art of Living Black,” a free community-boosting art exhibit.
Capturing the visual art of 50 regional artists of African descent, the 19th annual exhibit has its origins in metaphorically bare walls, after the late sculptor Jan Hart-Schuyers and late painter Rae Louise Hayward noticed that black artists were not being represented at exhibits.
The Art of Living Black is an eagerly anticipated show each year. And this year is no exception, as the exhibition celebrates 19 years of showcasing the work of Bay Area African American artists! We were thrilled when the fine folks at Radio Free Richmond posted this story about the exhibition. Come see it through February 27.
In the main gallery of the Richmond Art Center hangs a large painting with the words “BLACK LIVES MATTER” scrawled across the canvas in blood red paint. Around a corner is series of busts of Malcolm X. Scattered between the two are photographs, abstract paintings, and jewelry — all done by local African American Artists.
These works are displayed as part of the 19th annual “Art of Living Black” exhibit, which opened at the Richmond Art Center this Saturday. Showcasing over 60 local African American artists, the RAC show is the only one of its kind in the Bay Area.
“If you look back 20 years ago, there weren’t too many opportunities for African American artists to show their work together,” explains RAC Executive Director Ric Ambrose. “We felt that living in Richmond and having a large population of African Americans, the show just made sense.”
You don’t need to be an artist to work with clay or fibers. All you need is the desire. And a little support from your friends doesn’t hurt. The Richmond Art Center provides artistically inclined residents with potter’s wheels, electric kilns and looms to transform their creativity into a variety of art forms.
Located near the town Civic Center, the Richmond Art Center has one of the last remaining public art programs in the Bay Area. It first opened its doors in 1936. Every week, experienced artists as well as novices from Richmond and surrounding cities, mostly retired, come together to create pottery, weave fiber sculpture, basketry and quilt, and braid wonderful, multi-hued rugs. Most of the activities and events are free, but some classes do require a fee.
These workshops also provide retired people an opportunity to get to know more people in the community. Workshop participants said they are able to make friendships with their classmates and share in the inspiration and joy that comes from making things together.
We were thrilled to welcome our local news outlet, the Richmond Confidential, and its four reporters who documented the event with their cameras, video cameras and note pads! We’ve posted their story below, but you can read the original here.
By Fan Fei and Loi Almeron
Trick or treat? Halloween is here! Richmond Art Center is treating children to seasonal chills and thrills with its annual family art making event: Skeletonfest. This event was free and open to the public.
Three girls drew scary skulls on paper plates with colorful sugar paint. One girl couldn’t help taste her art work. No surprise. “It tastes like sugar,” she said.
Skeletonfest has been growing. Some 400 kids and adults came to the studio this year to take part in the drawing and painting, said Nicole Kite, education coordinator at Richmond Art Center.
“It is a great way to come and see the studios, meet our teachers, try a little bit art making,” Kite said.
Children and adults from around the East Bay had a grand time, decked out in scary costumes and bearing treats to share.
“We do a variety of things, like sugar skulls, decorate masks, do traditional paper cutting, Mexican flowers,” Kite said.“And this year we do these movable skeletons.”
More kids classes are coming up. A family event on how to use recycled materials to create art will be hosted in the same venue next spring, Kite said.
