Mildred Howard

Mildred Howard (b. 1945, San Francisco, California) is best known for her multimedia assemblage works and installations. For more than four decades, Howard has transformed everyday objects into powerful vessels for memory, history, and collective experience, exploring the ways personal narratives intersect with broader cultural histories. Drawing upon found materials and familiar forms, her work investigates how ordinary objects can become repositories of meaning, carrying stories that connect individual experience to broader social and historical narratives.

In 2015, Howard 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 (2004–2005), a fellowship from the California Arts Council (2003), the Adaline Kent Award from the San Francisco Art Institute (1991), and the Douglas G. MacAgy Distinguished Achievement Award from the San Francisco Art Institute (2018). Most recently, Howard received the 2026 Artists’ Legacy Foundation Artist Award and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Art. Recent major installations and exhibitions include presentations with Creative Time, New York; InSITE, San Diego; the Museum of Glass, Tacoma; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; the New Museum, New York; the City of Oakland; and the San Francisco Arts Commission and International Airport. Howard's work is held in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the de Young Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Oakland Museum of California, SFMOMA, and the San José Museum of Art, among others. Howard is currently the subject of Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, her first major museum retrospective, on view at the Oakland Museum of California through October 2026.