Mildred Howard

I was invited to SFAI last Saturday morning to go to a short term, adult class for the business side of art. The artist speaking and showing her work at this lecture was Mildred Howard. She is a very personable and vivacious woman, who has done a lot of public art, art commission work and installation work. She spoke about doing art residencies and going after grants and commission work. For those of you know San Francisco, one of the pieces that is hers is the Blue bridge installation on Fillmore at Geary. She spoke in tandem with her an art manager for about three hours in the morning, showing a wide variety of her work. The pieces that I adored were her houses that refract light and are I think about 10feet tall/wide....I was very interested in her speaking about her processes. She has a studio in Berkeley and for this one piece she got mirrors that were being disposed of by a glass/mirror factory that is literally across from her studio. She kept these mirrors for two years before she used them in this commission piece that is now in the Sacramento Museum. I had some basic questions that she answered regarding the process of physically creating such monumental sculptures, some of which are 20+feet high. She works with architects and construction crews and even though it may be something obvious, I imagined that in order to create such massive work, you the artist would be in charge of installing every last cement inch. She did a recent project with Glide Church that included the bottom two floors of an affordable housing project on Mason Street. She designed the exterior, she included an excerpt from a beautiful Langston Hughes poem. The opening of the building/Block Party will be on Sunday, October 26, 2008, from 1-4pm. It is at 125 Mason Street between Ellis and Eddy. It may be interesting to check out.
You can find out more about her and her work at http://www.7hz.org/arch/mildred/mildred.html