Mildred Howard, critically acclaimed Bay Area mixed media and installation artist, has been named the O’Brien Distinguished Visiting Professor at Scripps College. Ms. Howard’s month-long term begins March 2003, when she will take up residence at Scripps College, giving classroom presentations and leading discussions on her professional craft.
Named for Scripps alumna Erma Taylor O’Brien, class of 1936, the O’Brien Distinguished Visiting Professorship was endowed through her estate plans. Ms. O’Brien’s intent was to leave a legacy that would enable Scripps to host visiting scholars-in-residence whose expertise in the liberal and fine arts fields would significantly augment the existing curriculum.
“We are particularly pleased and excited that Ms. Howard has accepted this appointment,” said Scripps’ Dean of Faculty Michael Lamkin. “Her unique approach to difficult and controversial subject matter has made her a leading installation artist in both the national and international art communities, and her time at Scripps will afford our students the opportunity to gain critical insight on the challenges of presenting powerful themes through a variety of media.”
The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships for her unique and culturally significant work, Howard earned the prestigious Anonymous Was A Woman Fellowship in 2000 and is the 2002 recipient of a mid-career grant from the Flintridge Foundation in Pasadena. In her works, Howard explores a wide range of historical and contemporary experiences and themes, with a particular emphasis on her black American heritage. Her installations, composed of iconic objects from the past, are symbols for the way in which we construct memory and form racial, familial and cultural history.
Though her professional art career began in the 1970s, Howard has increasingly gained notoriety and critical praise in the last decade for her striking life-sized compositions, such as “In the Line of Fire,” a piece which portrays multiple cut-out images of an African-American soldier arrayed in bowling-pin fashion to suggest unity of cause, unheralded valor, and prevalent and ironic segregation, even in battle.
Howard’s work has been exhibited in numerous national galleries and venues including The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Berkeley Art Center, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco International Airport, and Nielsen Gallery in Boston, and internationally at The City Gallery in Leicester, England, Galerie Resche in Paris, France, and Galeria de Arte in Oaxaca, Mexico.
A former arts administrator with the California Arts Council and San Francisco’s Exploratorium, Howard received a master’s degree in fine art from John F. Kennedy University, and continues to live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area.