At no cost to you, your online purchases can help support the Art Center!
We all buy stuff on-line. It’s easy and convenient. With a tiny bit of advance planning, you can designate the Richmond Art Center as the recipient of a donation each time you buy. Your purchase price will not be increased; the donation comes from the company from which you are buying. Here are two ways to make this happen:
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:
Our Cinco de Mayo parade will never be the same again! Not only was the Richmond Art Center one of the parade’s official sponsors for the first time ever, the partnership between our Art in the Community programs and the Peace and Unity Cinco de Mayo Parade Committee resulted in two colorful floats and lots of community participation.
The floats were designed and built by Latino families from San Pablo and Richmond who attended a free, eight week float design class taught by teaching artists Neil Rivas and Patricia Rodríguez. The idea behind this class was to get teens involved in a civic effort that would encourage them to learn about the parade’s history, submit a proposal for a public art piece, and take an idea through the entire design process. The classes were possible thanks to the generosity of the San Pablo Koshland Fellows and the parade’s steering committee.
The art of more than a thousand students is on display during the Center’s 3rd Annual Art in the Community Student Show, running through Friday, May 29. To celebrate the exhibition’s opening, a free, public opening reception was held on Sat., May 9, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m.
This year the show doubled in size, featuring the ceramics, digital prints, metal works, prints, screen prints, murals, super hero costumes, floats, paintings, zines, collages, stop motion animation and mosaics of our after school and residency programs. More than 18 Richmond, San Pablo and El Sobrante sites were represented.
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.
On Tuesday, May 5, 2015 get ready to give for 24 hours to benefit your favorite local nonprofits. This is a great way to donate to organizations doing fantastic work like the Richmond Art Center. One of the oldest arts organizations in the Bay Area and the largest arts center in the East Bay, the Richmond Art Center provides quality programs and experiences in studio art, art in the community, and in exhibiting works of emerging and established Bay Area artists. We provide an invigorating environment where one can make, see and learn about art!
Here is your chance to make a difference! The Art Center’s goal is to raise over $3,000. Spread the word among your friends, acquaintances, and networks about the importance of East Bay Gives! Encourage them to make their own donations to Richmond Art Center and other participating charities. Like the East Bay Community Foundation on Facebook and follow us on Twitter, so that you can share posts about the event and the Art Center’s progress. Donate often on May 5th! Click here to make your donation.
Art in the Community Director Rebeca Garcia-Gonzalez shares an exciting update on how the program is engaging Richmond families in support of one of the city’s most important cultural celebrations of the year, Cinco de Mayo:
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).
