Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory

The retrospective exhibition Poetics of Memory highlights Mildred Howard’s five-decade career working in a dizzying array of diverse media including collage, sculpture, and photography. Curated by Carin Adams, it contains over thirty-five art objects supported by a nine-and-a-half-minute video presentation highlighting Howard’s many public art projects, further buttressed by an extensive collection of archival ephemera. All are connected by a throughline that investigates the double meaning of the word commemoration. Conventionally, the word refers to the act of remembering together, but less conventionally (and more literally), it points to a kind of double remembering that disentangles the denotations and connotations operating in how things are recalled. The aggregation of those things is usually understood to be history, reminding us of William Faulkner’s famous quip from Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In other words, it can often be conjured and reanimated according to new and different illuminations, including those that emanate from the “double consciousness” that W.E.B. Du Bois referred to when describing the way that African Americans understand their experience through their own eyes as well as those of economically dominant Anglo-Americans.