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.
The Richmond Art Center is proud to announce the 3rd Annual Upcycle, a maker festival for the whole family to create, see and learn about the art of upcycling. This free event will take place, rain or shine, on Saturday, April 25 from 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm.
Upcycling workstations will feature hands-on activities that creatively re-use materials otherwise headed for the landfill. Learn how to screen print patches, make bags from old ties and denim, create mosaics, weave rag rugs and create metal objects and recycled jewelry.
This event will also feature activities by numerous participating organizations, including Urban Tilth and Bridge Art Space. Healthy snacks will be provided. Kids under 12 must be accompanied by an adult.
This event is generously sponsored by: Kaiser Permanente
The Richmond Art Center announces its spring exhibitions which includes an exhibition of works by artist Mildred Howard, plus a milestone 50 years of the annual exhibition of the West Contra Costa Unified School District Student Show. These exhibitions will open with a reception on Saturday, Mar 21 from 4:00 – 6:00 p.m.
The main exhibition, Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter, will showcase works by Bay Area artist Mildred Howard. Over the course of four decades, Howard has created rich and evocative work by taking common objects of daily life and infusing them with meaning to illuminate the underlying significance and historical weight of cultural form. In free-standing sculpture, in wall-mounted musings, in graphic explorations and in representations of shelter, Howard has developed a language to address racism, injustice, need and compassion.
Howard’s work is already familiar to those living in Richmond, her public installation, Moving Richmond,, a work in which a poem by Macarthur Fellow Ishmael Reed was incised into a forty-foot wall of faceted steel can be seen at Richmond’s BART Station.
We are seeing so many articles and studies these days which point to the many benefits of arts education. This latest article, Arts Education Transforms Societies, from the Huffington Post creates a link to what we’ve been saying for a while: Creativity and independent thinking are the skills that will create tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.
Plus these amazing statistics and facts about Arts Education:
1,500 CEOs from around the world named creativity as the leading skill needed for business success.
Arts education increases employment rates by raising high-school graduation rates.
Low-income students who are highly engaged in the arts are more than twice as likely to graduate from college as their peers with no arts education.
Low-income students with a high participation in the arts have a dropout rate of 4 percent, in contrast to their peers with a low participation in the arts who have a dropout rate of 22 percent.
This year, our Art in the Community program will bring free programs to teach more than 1,600 local children through dozens of after-school and summer programs at elementary, middle and high schools, community centers, the Richmond Main Public Library and our most recent addition, a day-time program at Washington Elementary School in Richmond. These programs are entirely supported through the generosity of foundations, businesses and individuals.
This past Sunday, hundreds of people gathered at the Richmond Art Center to celebrate the life of Kato Jaworski, our long-time friend, a creative artist and the admired Studio Art Director of the Art Center, who passed away on December 28, 2014 after a serious illness. It was a beautiful day that fully embraced the unique person that we’ve been lucky and honored to have known since she became part of the Richmond Art Center in 2005, and it celebrated the incredible community that Kato created here. You can view the memorial program here.
A slideshow of images of Kato and her artwork. Thank you to everyone who contributed images.
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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.
Our Art in the Community program is leading an effort to bring the nationally recognized STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) education to Richmond in collaboration with several local organizations. These programs bring arts back into local schools while embracing the philosophy mentioned in the article: “Arts integration seems to be the best form of differentiation out there because it taps into so many different interests and abilities and forms of learning.”
Another important component of our Art in the Community program is offering annual professional development workshop series to help teachers integrate art into their classroom through hands-on activities. As the article stated, we also acknowledge that arts integration can be a hard model for teachers to embrace if they don’t feel like they themselves are competent artists.
What’s Your Superhero Power? That’s one of the questions our teaching artist, Neil Rivas, is asking a group of 15 students in our “Clavo’s School for Young Superheroes” class at the Atchison Village community center. The students are using art, literacy and digital media to envision themselves as a superhero charged with the goal of helping their community.
The students, ages 7 to 10 years old, are writing out and drawing their superhero origin stories in sketchbooks and will then create the special garments that their superhero will wear. Once these costumes are finished, the kids will visually document their superhero during a photo shoot. All of this work will culminate with the students making a final presentation to an audience of parents, teachers and community members.
Like all of our Art in the Community programs, this class is helping to bring arts education to children who don’t have access to it in their school day. Equally important, this class is also a rehearsal and a way to get kids thinking about the type of work they could do in the future.
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.
