Poetics of Memory spans five decades of Mildred Howard’s practice in her first major museum exhibition. Howard treats the home, the family archive, and stories of migration as materials that can build a space rather than as memories to be merely illustrated.
In Moving Stills (2026), Super 8 footage Howard shot at fourteen is projected onto cascading lengths of translucent fabric. Together with installations such as Crossings and Blackbird in a Red Sky, memory becomes an architecture one can enter: it filters bodies, light, and time instead of settling into a fixed document.
Image: Mildred Howard, Crossings, 1997. Photo: Lewis Watts. Courtesy Mildred Howard Archive / Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.