The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) will host a major retrospective for Bay Area artist Mildred Howard, titled “Poetics of Memory,” opening in June 2025. The exhibition spans five decades of Howard’s work, including new pieces, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with plans for a national tour. Howard, a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, has a long history with OMCA, which owns her 1989 installation *TAP: Investigation of Memory*. Senior curator Carin Adams, who worked with Howard on reinstalling *TAP* in 2019, proposed the retrospective to honor Howard’s legacy in the Bay Area arts scene.
This retrospective matters because it cements the legacy of an octogenarian artist whose career has been deeply intertwined with her community and regional institutions. By featuring installations like *Blackbird in a Red Sky* and *Crossings* that have rarely or never been shown in the Bay Area, the exhibition highlights Howard’s contributions to installation art and memory-based practice. It also underscores OMCA’s commitment to supporting local artists and preserving their work for future generations, serving as a model for how museums can honor living artists with deep institutional ties.