MILDRED HOWARD
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CONCEPTUAL DESIGN
ARTWORK DESCRIPTION
The House Will Not Pass for Any Color but Its Own, 2011
The notion of home has been an ongoing investigation and interest of Howard’s for decades and resulted in large sculptural installations throughout the country including at the Crocker Art Museum, the Di Rosa Preserve, and the Tacoma Museum of Glass, among others. She further explores this idea in her work at the airport—a 17’ glass house. Howard frequently explores how home is defined within the context of a place. For example, home can be considered a Country, a City, a neighborhood, or a house. Home can be a community, a family, a place where one feels safe, or it can be a shelter. It can be a metaphor for memories and/or where new ideas and thoughts are born. The proposed sculpture will be a reminder to passengers of where they have come from and their final destination. It will be a reminder of home.
The artwork is constructed with glass strips which, in the sun-flooded Concourse, will reflect and refract light, casting colored shadows on the surface of the surrounding areas during the day. The glass will likely be a shade of purple and scattered with photo etched images of California grasses or poppies. Laminated and approximately one inch thick for aesthetics, volume, and safety purposes, parts of the walls and ceiling will be missing. The structure will sit directly on the terrazzo floor. It will be framed in stainless steel.
ARTWORK FABRICATION IN-PROGRESS
Description of images clockwise from left to right:
The steel frame of Mildred Howard’s untitled sculpture was recently completed and is ready to be painted a bright green; the artist and her crew in front of the sculpture; a piece of hand-blown purple glass, leaning against a window at the fabricators studio, before it is cut.
ARTWORK INSTALLATION IN-PROGRESS
Artwork Foundry's crew installs the steel frame for the house sculpture.
Installers from Franz Mayer of Munich secured the hand-blown glass panels in place on the steel frame. The photo above to the left is taken from inside the glass house sculpture and the photo above to the right is a close-up shot of the hand-blown glass.
The photo above shows the completed artwork.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
A native San Franciscan, Mildred Howard’s work has appeared in exhibitions around the world and has garnered numerous awards, including the San Francisco Art Institute's Adaline Kent Award and fellowships from the Flintridge and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the De Young Museum, San Francisco, California; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California; Oakland Museum, Oakland, California; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut; Rene and Veronica di Rosa Foundation, Napa, California; and Rena Braunstein, San Francisco, California. Howard has also taught at Stanford and Brown universities and at the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts.
ARTIST WEBSITE
No website available.
