Storytime: Mildred Howard and Nengi Omuku Gather Us Home
By Wanda Sabir
It all happens now.
I realized, traveling between Oakland and Golden Gate Park
in the span of a week, that I wasn't seeing two exhibitions. I was listening to
one conversation between two Black women artists separated by a generation and
united by memory.
At the Oakland Museum of California, Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory asks
what history leaves behind. At the de Young Museum, Nengi Omuku's The Gathering imagines what
waits for us when we remember.
Together they are telling one story.
Storytime.
Later, in the African Art Galleries, where there is a short
conversation between the curator, Natasha, and Nengi—I'm purposely hanging out
in alliteration (smile)—I listened as I walked.
Then I sat down and watched the video.
Once.
Then again.
You know, Nengi Omuku's voice is a soundtrack.
A day later, I finally stood in the African galleries at the
de Young. Omuku's paintings rested among centuries of African sculpture and
ceremonial objects. It could have felt like an interruption—a contemporary
artist inserted into a historical collection.
Instead, it felt like an embrace.
Her work centered; the larger elders embraced her.
The galleries became less a museum than a family reunion.
Omuku paints on handwoven sanyan, ancestral cloth
that carries its own history before paint ever touches its surface. The cloth
has a sculptural presence. Figures emerge from lush gardens and dream
landscapes where memory is less an act of recollection than a way of being.
Standing there, I thought about something I have learned
over years of interviewing elders.
Memory is not simply what happened.
Memory is the story we tell ourselves until it breathes
life.
Sometimes those stories are inherited.
Sometimes they are imported.
Sometimes they are untrue.
Omuku offers one.
In her conversation with Natasha Becker, Omuku spoke about
her work with patients and caregivers in mental health institutions in Nigeria.
She understands that painting can be more than representation.
Creative tools are how we heal.
Creative tools are how we recover.
Beauty surrounded her.
So did art.
In Nigeria, sculpture is everywhere. As one sits at a
traffic circle there is a bust on the center island. As you drive down the
street, you see monuments in city parks. Guys sitting around a table
talking—ordinary, right? It's just they are forever stone.
It is the African Art Galleries in real time.
For real origin stories.
Standing there, I realized another conversation was taking place.
Many of the sculptures, masks, and ceremonial objects surrounding Omuku's paintings are far from the communities that shaped them. They entered Western museums through the upheavals of colonial conquest and displacement. Today, museums and communities of origin continue important conversations about stewardship, restitution, and return.
Then Omuku arrives.
Not as a visitor.
Bearing gifts from home.
Not relics of the past, but a living artistic tradition rooted in Nigeria's gardens, textiles, sculpture, and memory.
Suddenly the older works no longer seem isolated.
They are back in conversation.
Omuku said she first imagined herself as a sculptor before
one of her teachers encouraged her to pursue painting.
Her paintings still possess a sculptural presence. Painted
on handwoven sanyan, the canvas has the quiet authority of sculpture.
Woven and then sewn in strips, the fabric has holes so bodies can breathe in
the African heat. The cloth is not simply a surface. It is a stitched
narrative.
Horticulture adds another layer of meaning.
Her year working in her mother's horticultural business also taught her something larger. She did not need to import beauty or meaning. Much of what she needed was already there—in the garden, in indigenous materials, in inherited knowledge, in homeplace.
By paying attention, the artist discovered she already possessed riches that history had taught many of us to overlook.
Both artists are born from aesthetic traditions.
Neither woman had to discover beauty.
She inherited a way of seeing.
Beauty was not an occasional visitor in either home.
It was part of everyday life.
I recognized the landscape she paints, not because I had
seen these exact gardens before, but because I have walked parts of the world
that nourish them. I have traveled through Lagos, Benin City, Ile-Ife,
Abeokuta, Oshogbo, the Osun Grove, and Badagry. My own ancestral journey has
led me across Nigeria in search of stories and homecomings. I wanted to travel
farther north, where family history—located within my DNA—tells me some of my
Yoruba and Fulani ancestors began, but that pilgrimage will have to wait.
Perhaps that longing is why The Gathering felt so familiar.
It is a painting about return.
Not return to geography.
Return to ourselves.
There is a moment in the exhibition when time seems to stop.
The figures wait quietly in gardens that feel eternal. They are not rushing
toward tomorrow. They are remembering yesterday without becoming trapped inside
it.
They simply gather.
As we wait for pandemics to quiet, for petrol to fill yellow buckets, for fires to cool, and for public rage to soften, they remain there.
Waiting.
Listening.
Calling us home.
A few days earlier, another Black woman artist had asked me
a different question.
At the Oakland Museum of California, Mildred Howard asks not where we are going, but what we have carried with us all along.
Howard says these are stories she has the right to tell
because they belong to a people she belongs to.
That sentence became the key that unlocked the exhibition
for me.
Her retrospective, Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, is less a
survey of objects than an invitation to think about the lives those objects
have lived before they reached the museum. Howard has always been a maker.
Surrounded by antiques as a child in South Berkeley, she learned early that
ordinary things carry extraordinary histories if we are willing to listen.
Walking through the exhibition, I found myself listening.
There is the glass house.
There are the floating red apples.
There are bottle houses, mirrors, keys, shoes, family
photographs, dollar bills, eggs, and documents that ask us to look again at
what America remembers and what it chooses to forget.
Later, I stood before Howard's ceramic eggs arranged with meticulous care. Eggs are fragile, yet they hold life. Complete nourishment rests inside a shell no thicker than memory. Looking at them, I thought about Howard's reimagining of the familiar diagram of enslaved Africans packed into the hold of a ship. Those carefully ordered forms recalled bodies reduced to cargo, humanity measured and counted.
Howard transforms counting into witnessing.
The exhibition never lets us forget that objects are never
simply objects. They carry labor, migration, family, grief, survival, and joy.
Howard belongs to a generation of Black artists who grew up close enough to
segregation to recognize its disguises. There is a racial clarity in her work
that refuses sentimentality while never surrendering tenderness.
As I moved through the galleries, I realized that Howard and
Omuku were asking complementary questions.
Howard asks, What have we forgotten?
Omuku asks, How do we remember?
Between Oakland and Golden Gate Park, between glass houses
and eternal gardens, I found myself walking through one long conversation about
memory, lineage, and return.
Part II: Memory
Walking through Poetics of Memory, I understood that
statement differently.
She wasn't claiming ownership.
She was accepting responsibility.
The stories had chosen her.
And she has spent a lifetime making sure they are not
forgotten.
Howard grew into her vocation surrounded by antiques and
adults who knew their value. Her parents owned an antiques business in South
Berkeley and raised ten children in a home where objects carried stories. They
taught their youngest daughter to recognize craftsmanship, history, and beauty.
Through their example, they also taught her her own value. The world would have
sold her cheap had she let it.
She didn't.
Standing before Howard's glass house, I wasn't only looking at a sculpture.
I thought about my mother's childhood home in Poplarville,
Mississippi, where she lived until she was about ten years old. It was a
three-room house with an outdoor kitchen and an outhouse.
I don't know what that little house looked like inside.
What I do know are the homes I visited later.
My aunties' homes.
My cousins' homes.
The homes of other Black Southern women.
Years later, I recognized that same sensibility in the homes
of my Senegalese family in Rufisque.
Then I saw the women themselves.
Their dresses.
Their posture.
Their faces.
For a moment, I almost called out,
"Grandmother!"
That is what aesthetic traditions do.
They carry memory across oceans before we even have words
for it.
I think it might also be a Southern thing.
I remember my mother on Sunday mornings preparing for church. Her shoes, hat, gloves, and purse matched perfectly. Sometimes she wore a veil. I was so proud to be her daughter.
Years later, as an adult traveling in Africa, I saw these same crowns on women preparing for worship on Sundays. Only their crowns were wrapped works of art—long, colorful lengths of cloth twisted, folded, and tucked into magnificent headwraps.
That is what aesthetic traditions do.
They travel.
They remember.
They recognize one another.
Not poverty.
An aesthetic.
Lace curtains.
Framed photographs of heroes.
Scripture on the walls.
Sometimes newspaper tucked inside walls to keep the cold air
out.
Blue bottles catching malevolent spirits before they entered
the house.
Beauty was a necessity.
It was an act of faith.
An act of hope.
A declaration that despair would not have the last word.
The rooms were full even when physically empty.
There was texture in the air.
There was presence.
Often, before anyone greeted you, you could smell food
cooking.
Welcome arrived before words.
Howard returns to that same world in one of the exhibition's
largest installations. Home movies from a trip she made to Texas in her
youth—footage her mother thoughtfully stored in her pocketbook—are projected
onto paneled lace curtains spanning the back wall of the largest gallery.
I stood there for a long time gazing at Moving Stills.
The lace curtain was no longer decoration.
It had become an archive.
Memory moved across the fabric the way afternoon light moves
through a Southern window.
Earlier that same morning, I stood beneath the magnolia
trees in Chochenyo Park during Qigong practice. As we poured qi into our crown
chakras, I looked up where blossoms rested on fragrant altars just beyond
reach.
That afternoon, walking through Poetics of Memory, I
read about Howard's Magnolia Project, California Gold Dust, Queen Califia.
Another thing we share.
Perhaps that is why the exhibition felt so familiar.
Not because our lives were the same.
They weren't.
But because I recognized a way of seeing the world.
So many stories live in sweet red apples.
Poison.
Beauty.
Secrets.
Then there is the house made of glass and no tree.
Its absence is singularly noticeable.
Where is the parent that gave these apples life?
Where is the orchard?
But then these glass apples are not for eating.
They are for company.
They are for remembering.
The precision.
The lines.
Six by thirteen.
Hum.
Seventy-eight apples.
I counted them.
Keys.
Shoes.
Bottles.
Mirrors.
Eggs.
Photographs.
Objects many people pass by without notice become, in
Howard's hands, vessels of memory.
Part III: Value
A Black woman on currency.
One hundred bucks.
It is a photo-op moment (smile).
Howard created the work while she was a student in the
Fashion Design Department at the College of Alameda.
I smiled.
Another thing we share.
This year, as Howard celebrates her 81st birthday, I think
about the places her life and work intersect this writer's life.
I retired three years ago after twenty-five years teaching
English Composition and Reading at the College of Alameda, where I was one of
two tenured Black English faculty members. Today there are none.
Getting tenure was one of the happiest days of my life.
Retiring was another.
Tenure meant I could take care of my daughters.
That mattered to me.
Years later, my older daughter graduated from the College of
Alameda. While she was a student, my granddaughter attended the same Child
Development Center as Howard's ibeji. For a time, Bree's drawings
decorated the walls of my office.
If only I knew then what I learned by the end of my tenure.
These institutions are not interested in Black liberation.
Mildred Howard is.
Her artistic inquiry questions even as it answers.
I love her curiosity.
It is her theme song.
There is also her gift for insight and creative reuse.
She has been a maker all her life.
She knew her value.
The world would have sold her cheap had she let it.
She didn't.
Nor did she allow the world to sell her ibeji cheap
either.
In Yoruba cosmology, ibeji—twins—are sacred beings,
divine messengers whose arrival is considered a blessing.
One story especially delighted me.
Howard belonged to the artists' modeling union. When her
twins were old enough to model alongside her, she made certain they received
the same pay she received for the same work.
She was also a single mother, finding ways to support her
children while remaining faithful to her artistic practice.
That, too, is a lesson about value.
The exhibition begins with locks and keys—a quiet salute to
longshore labor, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local (ILWU) Harry Bridges,
founder, and, by extension, Cleophus Williams, the Union's first Black
president. Both men were friends of the Howard family. Labor frames this American story, from the 16, 17, 18, 19th-century holds of slave ships to the 20th-21st century cargo ships moving through the
Port of San Francisco.
Howard has spent a lifetime asking us to reconsider value.
Who determines it?
Who measures it?
Who is seen?
Who is remembered?
Material culture is her palette.
Black American culture colors everything.
Howard has spent a lifetime asking us to reconsider value.
Who determines it?
Who measures it?
Who decides whose labor matters?
It is memory made visible.
Conclusion
Later, I wandered into the museum store. Howard's red apples
were there. So was her one-hundred-dollar bill.
I picked them up.
I thought about taking one home.
Maybe next time.
I still had to pay for parking.
I smiled as I walked back through the galleries.
Before leaving, I wandered into the final gallery where
visitors are invited to leave personal reflections. The walls are already
filling with stories. The exhibition has only been open a few weeks. By
October, when it closes, there will be hundreds more.
I stood there reading.
Then I realized I had been writing my reflection all week.
It began beneath magnolia trees in Chochenyo Park.
It wandered through the African Art Galleries at the de Young.
It stopped to count seventy-eight floating apples.
It remembered my mother's stories, my aunties' homes, and
the women I came to know in Rufisque.
For one brief moment, I almost called out,
"Grandmother!"
It smiled at a Black woman on a one-hundred-dollar bill.
It paused at the College of Alameda, where Howard's journey
began and where so much of my own family's story unfolded.
It listened to lace curtains remembering Texas.
It found beauty where the world expected scarcity.
It found value where history often refused to look.
By the time I reached the final gallery, I realized I wasn't
there simply to see Mildred Howard's work.
I was there to remember my own.
It all happens now.
Howard has been telling our stories all along.
Now we are telling them back.
If You Go
Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory
Great Hall, Lower Level
Through October 11, 2026
Oakland Museum of California
1000 Oak Street
Oakland, CA
Spotlight Sundays
Mildred Howard in Conversation
with Nashormeh Lindo
Moderated by Essence Harden
Sunday, July 19, 2026
1:00–2:15 p.m.
Admission includes access to the exhibition.
For tickets, museum hours, and additional programs:
https://museumca.org
Nengi Omuku: The Gathering
Arts of Africa Galleries (Upper Level)
June 27, 2026–May 14, 2027
de Young Museum
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
Golden Gate Park
San Francisco, CA
For tickets, museum hours, and visitor information:
https://deyoung.famsf.org
posted by Interchange @ 2:53 AM
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