For more than 50 years, artist Mildred Howard has made meaning and memory her muses. The Bancroft Library recently acquired her archive. “There are so many stories behind so many pieces of paper,” Howard said. (Photos by Jami Smith/UC Berkeley Library)
From the outside, Mildred Howard’s home studio is unassuming, cradled in a crescent of streets in Oakland.A man sits on a bench, waiting for the bus. A woman walking southbound offers a greeting, a soft “God bless you,” as she passes.Climb one flight of stairs, and you ascend to another world.Morning light filters through the gauzy curtains on the floor-to-ceiling windows. A tufted chaise rests on a zebra-print rug. An oversized pear perches atop a stack of books beneath a scarlet semicolon, part of Howard’s series of glass punctuation marks, metaphors for the passage of time.Toward the back, at a table near a burnt-red wall, Howard is inspecting the contents of a box — one small part of her archive, recently acquired by The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.She carefully turns over each piece: photographs of her family and her travels, newspaper clippings, letters, and fragments of unfinished artworks — a needlework project on denim and a cutout photo of the late rapper and activist Tupac Shakur.“There are so many stories behind so many pieces of paper,” Howard said.The collection is a colorful patchwork chronicling a career spanning more than a half-century. Once processed and made available, it will offer students, scholars, and members of the public a never-before-seen look at the ideas, inspiration, methods, and memories of “a beautiful artist,” said Christine Hult-Lewis, Bancroft’s curator of pictorial collections.“What we’re looking at in her archive are materials that help us understand who she is,” said Hult-Lewis, who oversaw the final stage of the acquisition. “It’s such an interesting cross section of mixed media — all the different pieces that go into the incredible hopper of Mildred Howard’s mind.”
