Safe House
Author
Nina Zurier
Decade
1990s 2000s 2010s
Tags
Activism Community Gardening
Racial Justice
Sculpture
“When I did Safe House, I based it on a story. Home is supposed to be someplace safe—where secrets are kept, where you grow and you mature and all of those things. But I had heard this story about a young woman who was—someone tried to rape her in a kitchen, but what saved her is that she pretended to pass out. After a while she opened her eyes, she stood up, and she threw a butcher knife and it stuck in the wall. Another story: when Fred Wilson was working on one of his pieces—he is an artist, his work is part of the BAMPFA collection and he’s exhibited all over the world, including in the Venice Biennale—he discovered in his research that the same people who made all these silver objects that we leave in our cabinets, and maybe we’ll pull them out on Thanksgiving or holidays, well, they also made shackles. So why do we put such value on these silver objects? Because they’re just things, and that’s one of the reasons why I covered the floor of the house with them. They go from tarnished to polished to the knives in the wall. I still question what is home, what is a safe house. Because if you look at where we are today and see what’s happening in many urban environments, the demographics have shifted. And it’s like, are we really going backwards again? Even though there are communities that are diverse, there is still segregation in terms of where people can afford to live.”
—excerpt from Juneteenth discussion with Mildred Howard, BAMPFA, June 19, 2019
Mildred Howard has lived in Berkeley since 1947. She was a member of SNCC and CORE and participated as a youth in protests against segregation in Berkeley schools. In the early 1980s she founded the art program at East Oakland Youth Development Center, and then managed the Artists in Communities for the California Arts Council. She spent eleven years at the Exploratorium as resident artist and was the first executive director of the Alice Waters Edible Schoolyard Project. In 2002–4 she worked for the U.S. State Department as a cultural specialist in Egypt and Morocco, teaching workshops and lecturing. Welcome to the Neighborhood (2018, 30 min.) is a documentary film by Pam Uzzell about Howard’s family in Berkeley, weaving the story of the activism of her mother, Mabel Howard, with her own.
Howard has been an adjunct professor at SFAI; in 1991 she received SFAI’s Adaline Kent Award, and, in 2018, an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts as well as the Douglas G. MacAgy Distinguished Achievement Award for her work as an artist, activist, and educator in the Bay Area.
NZ
Video
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