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.
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 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.
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.
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.”
