As part of an occasional series inviting emerging artists to revisit the Berkeley Art Center’s archive, we asked Yétúndé Olagbaju to look back at Crossings, Mildred Howard’s 1997 solo exhibition at BAC, and to sit down with Mildred for an interview. Yétúndé tapped arts writer Taylor Brandon to join them. When they arrived, Mildred’s longtime friend, artist Nashormeh Lindo, was also there. What follows is an account of their conversation from June 2021. Parts of this interview have been edited for clarity and length.

On a beautiful sunny day, my co-conspirator (and close friend) and I park our cars in front of a studio space in West Oakland. I get out of my car and give Taylor a hug. I have to take a moment to ground myself. I am nervous! How else could I feel when meeting a creative force that has trail blazed the artistic path that I (and many others) now tread?

As we are welcomed upstairs, we are invited to an open and bright kitchen. Everything has its place in this beautiful maximalist space. Works of art, ephemera, and family photographs grace almost every wall.

This space feels deeply familiar, and as I notice things I recognize from my own home, my nervousness subsides — a small Mammy figurine, books on Black art, a neatly arranged cupboard of glass cups. This is the space of an artist who knows how to build a sense of home — literally and figuratively. And beyond mastery of her own craft, she has built a loving community of brilliance around her.

This is the home and studio of legendary artist Mildred Howard.

Taylor and I look at each other, wide-eyed, hands to our hearts. Mildred has not yet appeared, but I can faintly hear her reply from her back studio when her friend and prolific artist, Nashormeh Lindo, calls her name. Mildred is on the phone managing the defacement of her work at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center in New York. The glass window in front of her iconic piece In the Line of Fire, an installation honoring Black soldiers, had been spray painted with racial epithets overnight. Undeterred, Mildred was speaking with agencies in New York to officially report the defacement as a hate crime. Swiftness. In the midst of all of this, Mildred comes to the  kitchen to speak with us.

Mildred is keenly aware, conceptually agile, undeviating, and constant throughout our interview in her claim of agency and expertise on her own work and intention. There is no easy way to make an assumption with Mildred. She will lovingly ensure that you don’t confuse yourself on the meaning of her work or the impact of her advocacy. This power is one that certainly comes with experience and wisdom. As it should — Mildred has been making art since before Taylor or I were even a thought. Even in an unreleased video piece she shared with us that featured footage she shot on a Super 8 camera, at the age of 14, Mildred shows a deftly poetic creative skill that is mirrored in all of her future works. Both Mildred and Nashormeh are people who have been there, done that, built it and left spaces forever transformed.

Mildred’s 1997 exhibition Crossings would transform the Berkeley Art Center and set the tone for a generation of artists. This would be one of Howard’s first solo shows. It was also the first solo exhibition at the Berkeley Art Center in decades. The relatively small gallery would be a launching pad for a career filled with awards, hours mentoring  at the Exploratorium, and years of honing her praxis.

But what of this particular moment in Mildred’s life? This particular moment of genesis and transformation? And what about her process?

Taylor and I joined Mildred and Nashormeh to talk through some of these questions.

Mildred Howard: I grew up in Berkeley, and I was familiar with the Berkeley Art Center. Even prior to having an exhibition there, in the late 1970s and ‘80s I conducted after-school art programs for young people. We worked in front of the gallery, doing textile arts. Robbin Henderson was the director. I was at the Fiberworks Center for Textile Arts, and Robbin said: “It’s our 30th year, would you do an exhibition?” She said I could do whatever I wanted. And that’s always an open door for me. Because often parameters are set up where you have to work within constraints. That’s when I decided to do the piece Crossings (1997). Nashormeh, did I meet you around that time?

Nashormeh Lindo: Yes, I had heard of you because I was relatively new to the Bay Area — we moved here in 1996, and so I was just kind of exploring the area, and I had a friend who lived in Berkeley, Vonetta McGee. She had mentioned the Berkeley Art Center to me, that it was right down the hill and I just happened upon it one day. I saw your name and I said, "Oh, Mildred Howard!" I walked in, and I saw the piece with the eggs. And it blew me away. I just was blown away. I said, “Who is this woman? Who did this? I have got to meet her!”

Yétúndé Olagbaju: What did it feel like to not be given restrictions while making? Especially because that installation (obviously I wasn’t there) but it seemed so expansive, so huge.

MH: At the time that I did Crossings, I was working at the Exploratorium, which is a museum for art, science, and human perception, and I was responsible for teaching the integration of art and science. Right around that point, I was dealing with mirror displacement — setting up a mirror and displacing the image so it appears one way or another. I’m always trying to find a way to bring in the African American experience because I just don’t think it’s done enough. That’s the one thing I think that we have in common — we are always trying to bring in our experience in some kind of way. We reiterate that story.

NL: It’s interesting that you say that it seemed like this huge installation because it really wasn’t as huge as it looks. It’s an illusion of hugeness. But it was huge in a different way. And I think that part of it was the placement of the eggs. I’m telling you, when I first saw it, the placement was so precise that it gave the illusion of this huge expanse. The Middle Passage and all those kinds of things came into my mind. Motherhood came into my mind. This is before I had any children. And the notion that you have a limited number of eggs and all the other kinds of burdens that come on women. In our women. As you mentioned earlier it wasn’t a huge, huge room but it felt bigger than it actually was.

YO: Right. [To Mildred] I think that’s something I see in your work all the time.

MH: Right. [To Nashormeh] You brought up a really critical point because I had just visited Charleston, South Carolina, and I went to Indigo Plantation. And when I came back to do that piece, I said, I want the room as dark a blue as I could get. And I found those eggs in a tiny little shop. I bought a dozen eggs. They’re all ceramic. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, but I had them sell me a dozen. And when I was invited to do the show, I ordered 4,000.

What you were looking at was a parallelogram arrangement of the eggs: I wanted them to form a parallelogram inside of an octagon-shaped room. I thought the two shapes would play with one another — with the navy blue, the eggs on the floor, and the Rococo mirror on the wall. I think the Oakland Museum loaned me the mirror. Phil Linhares was the curator, and he brought it over and helped hang it for me. If you positioned yourself in a part of the room, you would become a part of that experience. That’s something that I always try to incorporate in my work, whether it’s my installation in Boston with the railroad tracks and the cannonballs, S.S. (Slave Stealer) (1998), or Walk Together Children (1992), with the wax feet, or The Gospel and The Storefront Church (1984). All of those are ways that I tried to incorporate the visitor or the spectator into my work, because it’s not just about me, or us. It’s about a human experience. Yes, it’s about African Americans, but it’s about the experience that we have as a people in this country, and the kinds of things that we have gone through to get us to where we are now. When Nashormeh talked about womanhood — yes, it’s the fragility of life; it is the sustenance of life.

NL: The whole idea that we have this limited number of opportunities to reproduce, and so it may be that we have 4,000 — I don’t know how many eggs women end up with, I never counted mine, who can? But there was a magical feeling to this experience, because with that lighting? It felt like a womb. It was really the darkness but then the eggs were lit up. I don’t know how you figured out the lighting, but it really did highlight this notion of fertility — not just in terms of having children, but also artistic fertility.

MH: I was also thinking about the Middle Passage. When 15 million  — 15 million — Africans lost their lives. Some jumped overboard, others were killed. Others were…. That was one of the things that moved me the most. I wanted to articulate that period in history. I put gels on the lights so they were red and blue, and the eggs were white.

NL: Red, white, and blue.

MH: This is the American story. Or, rather, the story of the United States, because America is bigger than just the United States — it’s North and South America, Central America, the Caribbean, parts of the Virgin Islands, Samoa, Hawai’i. People say America, but now I’m talking about the United States, even though Africans were enslaved all over the Americas.

NL: I just had an epiphany, which is that in the red, white and blue — the eggs, they’re like points of light, like stars on the US flag. And that’s a whole other perception. I hadn’t thought of it until you said that.

MH: Wow.

NL: It was a reflection of the history of the United States of North America and the implications of the Middle Passage on the development of this country, which we’re still arguing about. People still don’t want to have this discussion. I hear this word ‘cancel culture.’ I don't even know what the hell that means. Because that information has been canceled from the culture.

MH: The enslavement of Black people, I think it did a job on us as a people — and it’s still doing that. The Middle Passage started it, but it’s continued. And until this country, and those countries that have been part of colonization, come to terms with this and deal with it, it’s going to continue.

Taylor Brandon: You’ve been talking about the lights and wounds. It makes me also think about incubation and coming into this American-ness and having to witness yourself in the mirror.

MH: You become a part of that experience. One of  the things that both Nashormeh and I have in common is the grappling with this warped history and trying to articulate the way we see it. As women, as Black folks, as artists. As an artist, I make things the way I see them. If I see them a certain way... it’s in some ways a little bit selfish, but if I don’t like it, why should I expect someone else to like it? I don’t even know if ‘like’ is the right word. It has to resonate with me in some kind of way.

Taylor and I learned so much sharing space with Mildred and Nashormeh that day. We left inspired, grateful, and feeling immensely lucky. I struggle to find the words to describe how generous they were with us.

Nashormeh ended the conversation by quoting her dear friend Richard Mayhew. She said that he tells certain artists and people: “You’re part of the Spiral now.” She adds: “This creative force that just keeps going around, we keep returning to each other, to the creativity. It’s a continuum. And you are now incorporated into that vortex and it’s your job now to keep it going.”

And continue to spin and transform, we will.

BIOS

MILDRED HOWARD is best known for her multimedia assemblage work and installations. She completed her Associates of Arts Degree & Certificate in Fashion Art at the College of Alameda in 1977 and received her MFA from Fiberworks Center for the Textile Arts at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley in 1985. In 2015, she received the Lee Krasner Award in recognition of a lifetime of artistic achievement. She has also been the recipient of the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2017), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2004/5), a fellowship from the California Arts Council (2003), the Adaline Kent Award from San Francisco Art Institute (1991), and received the Douglas G. MacAgy Distinguished Achievement Award at San Francisco Art Institute (2018). Her large-scale installations have been mounted at Creative Time (New York), InSITE (San Diego); Museum of Glass (Tacoma, WA); National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC); New Museum (New York), the City of Oakland; and the San Francisco Arts Commission and San Francisco International Airport. Her works reside in the permanent collections of BAMPFA (Berkeley, CA); de Young Museum (San Francisco); Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum of Glass and Contemporary Art (Tacoma, WA); Oakland Museum of California; SFMOMA; and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others.

NASHORMEH N.R. LINDO is an artist, arts educator, consultant, curator and arts advocate. Her work as a renowned photographer, printmaker, and painter has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. As an artist, Lindo’s recent work explores the way one medium informs another, utilizing her photographs for surface design on textiles. As an educator, Lindo teaches art classes to children in Oakland and is a former adjunct instructor of African American Art History at City College of San Francisco. She has served as a consultant for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Oakland Museum of California and on staff at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library and the Baltimore Museum of Art. A native of Philadelphia, Lindo received her M.S. in Educational Leadership from the Bank Street College of Education, and her B.A. in Art from Pennsylvania State University. Lindo served on the California Arts Council from 2014 to 2021, serving three years as the first African American woman to be Council Chair. She lives and works in the Bay Area with her husband, actor Delroy Lindo, and their son, Damiri.

YÉTÚNDÉ OLAGBAJU is an artist and maker, currently residing in Oakland. They utilize video, sculpture, action, gesture, and performance as through-lines for inquiries regarding Black labor, legacy and processes of healing. They are rooted in the need to understand history, the people that made it, the myths surrounding them and how their own body is implicated in history’s timeline. They have shown work and projects with Oakland Museum of California, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Pt. 2 Gallery, Southern Exposure, SOMArts Cultural Center, Untitled Art Fair, Art Basel, and more. They hold an MFA from Mills College and are the recipient of the inaugural Nancy Cook Fellowship, the Murphy Cadogan Awards, and the Jay Defeo Award. They are currently in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

TAYLOR BRANDON is an artist and writer from Oakland, whose practice is grounded in the study of Black geographies, Black American cultural lineages, her family, and her experience as a Black queer woman. Her practice is defined by her own intuition, movement, archival work and experimentation through video and writing. Taylor uses the interiority, chemistry, movement, and mundaneness of her own body as a starting point and model to understand herself and the worlds around her. Taylor’s creative practice is preceded by a five year public relations career in entertainment, art, and education. She is also a founding member of No Neutral Alliance (NNA), a group of working artists and arts administrators who are fighting to dismantle anti-blackness within arts institutions while simultaneously creating meaningful space outside institutions. Taylor’s work has been published in Vanity Fair and Abstractions Magazine. 

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