The 81-year-old East Bay multi-media artist gets her first major museum survey at the Oakland Museum of California — a retrospective rooted in the same South Berkeley neighborhood her family shaped and that later pushed her out.

As a girl in the late 1940s, Mildred Howard's mother would take her and her siblings from their home in South Berkeley to the Snow Museum near Lake Merritt — a forerunner of the Oakland Museum of California. Seventy-odd years later, Howard's first major museum survey has opened at OMCA itself, 1000 Oak St., and it runs through Oct. 18.

"Mildred Howard: The Poetics of Memory" ($25) is a career-spanning roundup of collages, mixed-media pieces, immersive installations, sculptures, and personal memorabilia — work that OMCA curator Carin Adams has called the output of "a pioneer in helping establish what we think of as installations," in the company of artists like Yayoi Kusama and Judy Chicago.

Howard was born in 1945 in San Francisco to parents who had come west from Texas as part of the Great Migration. Her father worked in the Hunters Point shipyards; her mother, Mable, ran an antiques business out of the family home and became a community organizer of some consequence — leading the successful fight, in the 1960s, to underground the BART line through South Berkeley and keep the predominantly Black neighborhood from being permanently divided by an elevated rail structure. The recycling of discarded things, and the politics embedded in public space, became hallmarks of the daughter's art.

The two threads converge in the 2024 bronze sculpture "Delivered, Mable's Promissory Note," installed near the Ashby BART station — the very line Mable Howard fought to put underground. The swirling piece draws on West African metalwork traditions and stands, in the sun, as a repayment on the community's long overdue debt.

The retrospective arrives after a run of institutional recognition. Last year, Howard won a Guggenheim Fellowship — on her 16th application — to join two Rockefeller grants and two NEA fellowships. Also last year, her archive was acquired by UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, where it now sits alongside the papers of Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange.

Howard was pushed out of South Berkeley around 2017, when a rent doubling drove her to a converted factory studio in West Oakland — during a decade in which the Black population of South Berkeley fell by roughly 30 percent. Berkeley's mayor had declared March 29 "Mildred Howard Day" in 2011. She was 65.

She is now 81, working out of the West Oakland studio, and at OMCA through the fall. Someone walking past the Ashby BART station this week, looking at the bronze spiral catching the morning light, is looking at the same ground the retrospective is built on.