“Two exhibits celebrate Richmond Art Center milestone” via SFGate.com
Our opening reception on Saturday, March 19 kicked off this wonderful retrospective of David Park’s drawings and gouaches. Many of these pieces have never been exhibited before.
We hope you’ll visit the Art Center to see this show, open now until May 22 and free to the public.
Keefer working on an embroidery project. Photo: Melati Citrawireja via Berkeleyside.
“Amy Keefer is not your average rainy afternoon knitter, crocheter or embroiderer. Keefer holds both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts with an emphasis on textiles and fibers, and uses these patience-demanding crafts as tools for self-expression, as well as to provoke political discussion.”
We’re proud to have Amy on our staff of Teaching Instructors. Please be sure to read the rest of the Berkeleyside interview with Amy, and be sure to register for one of her classes this Spring!
As we enter into the final week of Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter, the Huffington Post’s Jane Vandenburgh has published a lively and thought-provoking piece on the exhibit. Vandenburgh concludes, “If you haven’t seen this show, don’t miss the chance. If you have had the pleasure, you may well want to go again, as as with all great things there’s really so much more to see.” Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter closes on Sunday, May 24 with a reception from 3:00 to 5:00pm. Read the full Huffington Post piece here:
Squarecylinder.com has just published a profound piece by Jeff Kelley
on our current exhibition Mildred Howard: Spirit & Matter … it is truly illuminating and you can find it here. The exhibition runs through May 24:
Jeff Kelley, May 9, 2015
Mildred Howard’s quasi-retrospective installation of assemblages, mixed media prints, collages, and sculptures at the Richmond Art Center is elegantly spare and richly reverberant. If you stand at the entrance and squint the show falls softly into place. We intuit this to be an organic whole, an assemblage of assemblages. While the gallery space is not very big, its reputation as a decades-long outpost for noteworthy Northern California art precedes it, adding a buzz to the atmosphere. A few well-positioned red walls incite a modernist semaphore, signaling the era from which Howard’s works emerge. She is a modern artist, of course, but from its wing of conceptual collage, which draws mostly upon photo-and-other-graphic impressions from the not-so-distant past, her family’s. She also draws upon a kind of thrift, hand-me-down, or secondhand material culture for the assembling of her sculptures.
We are elated that “Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter” has garnered such extensive media coverage. The San Francisco Chronicle has published a third piece on the exhibition; the newspaper’s latest contribution comes from columnist Leah Garchik, who penned her thoughts on Howard’s work. “Spirit and Matter” runs through May 24 in the Main and West Galleries.
San Francisco Chronicle: Leah Garchik, April 23, 2015
We were away last month when “Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter” opened at the Richmond Art Center, so we went instead to the Sunday, April 19, walk-through conducted by curator Jan Wurm. The art center is a roomy facility that offers classes in all kinds of art forms. Its exhibition space is airy and bright, and in the lobby Wurm had set out coffee and refreshments for the art lovers. It all felt very welcoming.
Writer and composer Charles Shere has written a deeply intriguing review of our exhibition, Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter. He places her imposing work in an art historical context and illuminates its importance in contemporary society. More of Shere’s writing can be found on his blog, The Eastside View.
Installation, Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter , Richmond Art Center
MILDRED HOWARD is an artist of considerable standing in an area — Northern California — not exactly hurting for powerful, mature artists. She has worked in collage, painting, assemblage, and sculpture for decades, always bringing to her work intellectual energy drawn from a sober, serious contemplation of self and society. I don’t know any artist who excels her in treating the significance of being African-American in contemporary American society, or in treating the history of that situation, without bogging down in mere politics-of-the-moment. A “white,” I can’t of course speak from within that “situation”: but it does seem to me the significance, the meaning, the roots and the reach of Howard’s work must be the same to a black viewer as to a white.
We are pleased to share San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker’s review of Mildred Howard’s Spirit and Matter retrospective. The exhibit runs through May 24 in the Main & West Galleries.
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!
Photo credit: John Wehrle
Mildred Howard on Art, Race, and Memory
Radio Free Richmond, April 1, 2015
by Sean Pyles
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.
Art Center Tours Unveil its Possibilities
Richmond Pulse, April 2014
Malcolm Marshall
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.
50 Years of Honoring Young Artists at the Richmond Art Center
KQED Arts, March 30, 2015
By Kristin Farr
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.”
