Thank you to all of our volunteers for helping us out with Upcycle, our opening and closing receptions and for helping out with gallery installations! We would like to give a special thanks to Mary Gillis who is an extraordinary force transitioning our galleries from start to finish! Thank you Mary! You ROCK!
Art in the Community Director Rebeca Garcia-Gonzalez shares an update on the conclusion of the Annual Student Show and the beginning of the program’s popular STEAM Camps:
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.
