Mildred Howard keeps a 10-foot-tall sculpture of Junipero Serra bound and blindfolded in her West Oakland garage, positioned next to her black Mercedes. The Spanish missionary, wrapped in what Howard calls "Make America Great Again red" and clutching his signature cross, sits surrounded by U-Haul boxes, paint cans, and discarded furniture. It's part of her Untold Histories / Hidden Truths series, a recent work that exemplifies how the octogenarian artist transforms her sprawling 15,000-square-foot warehouse into something between studio, home, and monument to resistance.
In June, the Oakland Museum of California opens its doors to the first major retrospective of Howard's five-decade career. For an artist who has been working steadily since the 1970s, the timing might seem late. Howard herself made the point with characteristic directness: "It's the first retrospective for me in a major museum. You have to be almost dead for that to happen."
But Howard is far from a sunset figure. Over the past few years, institutional recognition has arrived with unexpected speed. In 2023, she received honorary doctorates from both California College of the Arts and California State University, East Bay. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley acquired her archive earlier this year. Then came April 2025: after 15 years of applications and 15 years of rejections, the Guggenheim Foundation awarded her a fellowship. When the congratulatory letter arrived, Howard had to call the institution to confirm it was real.
"It's been an explosion of activity that's really gratifying to see," says Carin Adams, senior curator of art at OMCA. "There's been a concerted effort to make sure that we're uplifting the voices we should be. It really does feel like she's having a moment, and one that she's deserved and waited for for a long time."
The retrospective runs through October 2026 and draws from decades of work shaped by a life rooted in community. Howard was born in San Francisco in 1945, the youngest of 10 children whose parents were both dockworkers and entrepreneurs. Her mother, Mable Howard, led the fight to route BART tracks underground through Berkeley, protecting the predominantly Black neighborhood from further displacement. Howard's family occupied a four-block radius of South Berkeley for more than 50 years.
In 2017, rising rents forced Howard from the South Berkeley warehouse where she had lived and worked for 19 years. Her entire family scattered. Houses became more than a physical form in her work after that, they became a language for memory and loss. From her 2005 installation "Blackbird in a Red Sky," a modernist structure made from red glass panels, to recent glass bottle houses, Howard has returned to the architecture of home repeatedly.
"Houses hold memories. They're like vessels of information," Howard says.
A friend and renowned art handler, Scott Atthowe, offered her space in West Oakland, in a former canvas wholesaler's warehouse. She moved in, vacuumed decades of fiber dust from the rafters, refinished floors, and painted the brick walls bright white with bold red accents. She designed a kitchen that doubles as creative space, complete with ceiling-mounted pot racks and rolling steel workbenches topped in white quartz.
The warehouse is divided down the middle, ostensibly separating living from making. The actual boundary is almost invisible. Her dining room table holds the bronze sculpture "Kiss the Cake," in which disembodied work gloves grasp a rolling pin topped with a mould of Howard's own ruby-red lips. The table sits among dozens of other works, including pieces by artists in her orbit and by her longtime partner John Moore, who died last year.
"I am always thinking about my work, even when I don't want to think about it, like when I go on vacation," Howard explains. "It's not really separate from my life. It's part of who I am as a person."
Museum curators spent considerable time in that space preparing the retrospective, studying stacks of sketches, combing through decades of photographs and correspondence, borrowing items that illuminate her story: a high school yearbook, Valentine's cards from Moore, a child-size wooden chair from her first art classes at a South Berkeley church.
Author James Rodriguez: "Howard's rise in the art world feels less like discovery and more like overdue recognition of someone who built her entire vision on the ground-level activism her family modeled."
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