500 Capp Street and Fort Point, San Francisco (NOTE–Collaborating with the Muses is installed at two venues)

Continuing through August 23, 2025

Mildred Howard’s uncanny wrapped figures resemble banal ghosts. The word “resemble” normally means “to look like,” but in our fraught iconoclastic moment it means something more: to re-assemble. Gathering fractured histories and binding them in red fabric, as Howard does, helps us reconsider our relationship to the past. Toppling statues, though righteous, mistakes the symptom for the disease. A bronze figure is not an evil system but its dumb shadow, the pig’s lipstick. Knocking them down is a Potemkin bonfire of the vanities. The real injustice — the structural rot beneath — remains untouched. Rage still roils. When the moment passes, the hate only gets hotter, hardening into the kind of malaise we have today.

Howard subtly weaves San Francisco’s layered stories into her art with a wise whisper. Blink and you might miss her quiet monuments; pay attention and they could change your life. Her new works are presences shrouded ins red fabric and planted in charged spaces. The sole figure at 500 Capp St. is of Father Junípero Serra, the missionary whose legacy is tangled with conquest and blood, and whose bronze effigy in Golden Gate Park was toppled in 2020 during the George Floyd protests.

Rather than a doppelganger (or a topple-ganger?) of the lost figure, Howard gives us an approximation of attributes. No destruction here, instead a careful wrapping, memory sealed like a mummy’s shroud. It’s a ghost’s ghost, a vessel for memory and myth. The cross, the book, the imposing scale all demand attention, while the fabric’s folds bind and obscure, resisting easy understanding. Meaning lives not in the form itself but in the hopes and fears we project onto it. A braided noose hangs at Serra’s feet.

Five years after the statue toppling frenzy, what’s really changed? The images went viral, but the forces behind them — racial capitalism, colonization’s latest horrific manifestations, ICE — have grown exponentially stronger. The rush to erase monuments created a strange paradox: in the wake of efforts to destroy them, they were martyred, turned into sacred relics, gaining power by becoming forbidden. Had the protestors let them be, they might have lost meaning.

For their part, Howard’s sculptures don’t accuse or defend. They hover in limbo, wraiths of pulsating indeterminacy. 

At Fort Point, her wrapped figures of Peter Burnett, William Gwin, and Francis Scott Key vamp in a Civil War-era fort as part of “Black and Gold: Stories Untold,” featuring a group of 17 artists. These three individuals are not exactly over-represented in California public sculpture, the sole example being that of Key, which stood in Golden Gate Part until it, like that of Serra, was toppled in 2020. Howard’s choice of them over other candidates, however, highlights the contradiction and complexity at the core of California’s founding. Burnett, California’s first elected Governor, pushed for the exclusion of African Americans from the state; Gwin was one of its first Senators and a Confederate sympathizer; and Scott Key was the slave-holding author of the text to our national anthem. Encountered in brick vaults and framed in overhead arches, they look collectively like a Giorgio de Chirico painting. They feel like leftovers from some obliterated Ozymandian empire. Would that it were so.  

Here’s the kicker: Figurative sculpture isn’t going anywhere. After all those bronze statues fell, we now get Trump’s “Garden of American Heroes.” We must live with the human form, so Howard slyly questions what matters, that is, how we question who we honor and why. The “what” we already know. The artist gives us the “how” and the “why.” Howard doesn’t blast old myths to rubble; she enfolds them in ambiguity, inviting us to rethink them without telling us what to think. Good art doesn’t solve problems, it unsettles certainties. Monuments aren’t ultimately about their inscriptions or the solidity of stone; they’re about the stories we tell around them, and those narratives change, just as we do.

Howard’s wrapped figures don’t roar. They loom, carving out quietude in a world too loud and too sure of itself. Perhaps power isn’t toppled by noise and fury but by stillness, reflection, by a refusal to see history as static. Inert work matters most when we move past it. And so we do, with an attitude that resembles hope.