Behind the Curtain: Ishmael Reed’s The Amanuensis Exposes America’s Fantasy Machine

By Wanda Sabir

The October engagement closes Sunday, October 18, at Berkeley's Black Repertory Group. The play returns November 13–22 as part of its 64th Mainstage Season.

In the year marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, playwright Ishmael Reed makes another wall fall. What we discover behind it is not pretty, despite the beautiful music, dancing flowers, animated animals and smiling faces we have been taught to love.

In The Amanuensis, now playing at the Black Repertory Group in Berkeley, Reed asks us to examine not just the theft of Black labor, but the theft of Black genius. We are accustomed to hearing how enslaved Africans built America with their bodies. Reed reminds us that it was also their intellect, imaginations, stories and cultural knowledge that made enormous fortunes for others.

Hollywood is one of America's great fantasy machines. And Black intellect has been part of its circuitry from the beginning.

An amanuensis is a person who takes dictation, a note-taker, not necessarily an author. Joel Chandler Harris collected the stories of African people enslaved on a Georgia plantation, published them as the Uncle Remus tales, and became famous. The storytellers, including Aunt Crissy, Old Harbert and George Terrell, remained largely invisible while the white man who recorded their stories became a celebrated literary figure.

Enter Walt Disney.

Disney adapted Harris's tales into the 1946 film Song of the South, combining live action and animation. The film generated substantial revenue and later inspired theme park attractions. The original African storytellers received neither recognition nor payment.

In Reed's play, however, the storytellers return to collect.

The work is excellent! Bobby Clements's direction is clear, and the performances are strong. My one reservation is the opening narrative, which is a bit long. Too much tell and not enough show. However, when I began doing my own research into the wee hours of the night, I understood why this information was there. The history matters.

Reed's theater is for a thinking audience. It is funny, sometimes absurd, historically provocative and intellectually demanding. You might leave wondering, "What did I just see?" Then, as you travel home, the questions continue.

The seductive power of the lie

I found Song of the South on the Internet Archive. Beneath the film were comments from viewers remembering how much they loved it.

I watched James Baskett, the extraordinarily talented Black actor who portrayed Uncle Remus, moving through a world of singing birds, flowers and beautiful animation. He sings "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah," and for a moment everything seems wonderful.

But I kept thinking: How do you make something as brutal as slavery beautiful?

The film is set after emancipation, yet it preserves an idyllic vision of plantation life. The formerly enslaved Black man becomes the emotional caretaker of a white child whose family is experiencing difficulties. His stories comfort the child, protect him and help restore the white family's happiness.

I thought about Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights, whose storytelling becomes a means of survival. Uncle Remus also uses stories to prevent a catastrophe. But whose survival does his wisdom serve?

In Disney's universe, the Black storyteller's intelligence becomes another service rendered to white people.

We have encountered this fantasy before in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Victor Fleming's Gone with the Wind. These films differ in their storytelling, but each helped convince audiences that white supremacy could be noble, romantic or even benevolent.

This is the seduction of cinema. Once we enter the theater, the world outside disappears. We accept the director's version of reality. Like the Wizard of Oz, the person behind the curtain controls what we see.

And we willingly participate.

I remember the children wearing mouse ears on television, the Disney programs, the fairy tales that became part of our childhoods. We passed these stories to our children, who passed them to theirs.

How much of what we believed about ourselves and one another was manufactured inside a studio?

We think we are living in the real world. Perhaps we are living inside a studio set.

The mask comes off

In The Amanuensis, Reed refuses to let the plantation fantasy stand.

One of the most powerful moments comes when Aunt Crissy, portrayed by LaTarsha McCoy, confronts Miss Sally, played by Sherry Davis, who believes the affection between them was genuine. The woman seems wounded to discover that the person she regarded as devoted to her did not share her feelings.

Aunt Crissy tells her otherwise.  She speaks of sexual exploitation, of caring for white children while being denied the freedom to nurture her own, and of the things she could never say aloud. Her enslavers did not know her. They knew only the person she had to pretend to be.

I thought immediately of Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem, "We Wear the Mask."  The mask was not evidence of contentment. It was a means of survival.

Another unforgettable moment comes when Raymond Nat Turner, portraying Uncle Terrell, recounts the physical violence he endured. He gestures toward his back and leg, identifying where he was deliberately injured.

There is no need for theatricalized suffering, no trauma pornography. The words and gestures are enough.  Reed trusts the audience to imagine what happened.

The people onstage are not simply victims. They are thinkers, observers, artists and human beings who understood their circumstances even when they could not safely say what they were thinking.

When the tricksters take the stage

Then there are Br'er Rabbit and Sis Fox.

Their presence takes the play beyond historical reenactment and into folklore and philosophical comedy. These fictional characters enter the world of their creators, bringing their own personalities and unpredictable behavior.

The lovely Nina Causey, as Sis Fox, is not surprised by the antics of Br'er Rabbit, played by Jahn Overstreet. Sis Fox understands something the others initially overlook: Br'er Rabbit is a trickster. This is his nature. Why should anyone expect him to behave differently?

I love this scene.  There is something wonderfully philosophical about Sis Fox's acceptance of the Rabbit's character. Understanding someone's nature does not mean surrendering to their behavior. It means knowing whom you are dealing with.

Reed gives us another lesson in power: Knowing the rules of the game matters, but so does knowing the character of the person sitting across from you at the poker table.

Nina Causey's beautiful rendition of "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" also reminds us that the art itself is not the enemy. The music, the humor and the stories have their own value. The problem is what happens when they are taken, repackaged and used to conceal the lives of the people who created them.

California is not innocent

Reed's creative work has long been connected to California. It is fitting that The Amanuensis is being performed in Berkeley, in the state that gave us Hollywood.  In her wonderful 1918 essay, Slavery in California, Black journalist and historian Delilah L. Beasley documents a history many Californians still do not know.

California became a state on September 9, 1850. Yet during the 1849 Constitutional Convention, delegates attempted to prohibit free Black people from entering and settling in California. The provision was removed from the final constitution, but the effort did not end there. After California became a state, legislators continued trying to pass laws excluding Black people. Imagine that. Even as California prepared to enter the Union as a free state, some of those writing its laws wanted to keep Black people from living here. And Black people were already here!

People of African descent were part of California's history long before statehood. They helped establish early California communities, including Los Angeles, San Jose and San Francisco. Some of these early Californians had both African and Indigenous ancestry. And we should not forget that some Black Californians are Indigenous to this land as well.

California's Black history did not begin with the Gold Rush, the Great Migration or Hollywood.  So what kind of freedom was California offering in 1850, and to whom? This is the same state that eventually became home to the world's most influential film industry. What does that tell us about the stories Hollywood would later manufacture and sell to the world? Reed makes the fourth wall crumble. We can see the machinery behind the illusion and who actually powered it.

The casual arrogance of power

One of the most chilling aspects of the play is the casual arrogance of those who benefited from the theft.  John Bramhall portrays the Ghost of Joel Chandler Harris, the writer who published the Uncle Remus stories. Harris sits tied to a chair, confronted by the very people whose stories made his literary reputation possible.

He offers explanations, qualifications and excuses. What about the kind enslavers? What about those who cared for the people they enslaved? Wasn't slavery responsible for bringing African people Christianity and civilization?  The justifications are familiar. They are also absurd.

Disney's theatrical counterpart is especially revealing. His long explanation of how the enterprise benefited from these stories sounds almost like a confession without remorse.

Yes, it happened. Yes, money was made.

So what?

That is the question hanging over the production.  What happens when the truth is known but the wealth remains untouched? What happens when the people whose ideas created the wealth have no meaningful way to recover what was taken? The original storytellers are long dead. Copyright law offers no straightforward remedy for the appropriation of their oral traditions. Yet others continued making money from their stories for generations.  And here we are, celebrating 250 years of American independence while still struggling with the question of who has truly enjoyed freedom.

Who pays for the fantasy?

I also kept thinking about James Baskett.  He died in 1948 at just 44 years old, two years after the release of Song of the South. He received an Honorary Academy Award for portraying Uncle Remus, yet racial segregation prevented him from attending his own film's Atlanta premiere.  What must it have cost Black actors to bring their gifts to an industry that so frequently required them to portray their own people as contented servants?

We cannot know the full private cost of Baskett's performance. But the contradiction remains. His talent helped bring a distorted world to life, while the real world denied him the dignity granted to his white colleagues.

And this is why The Amanuensis matters. The Black people whose stories were taken were not simply bodies performing labor. They created stories filled with humor, philosophical wisdom and knowledge about survival. The trickster tales showed how people without physical power could use their intelligence to outwit those who held it.

Hollywood did not invent this genius. It profited from it.

And with Reed, the original storytellers finally get to speak. 

Theater cannot undo history, but it can challenge the stories we have been told. It can expose a lie so thoroughly that we cannot comfortably return to believing it. It was Black genius that helped power the ship. Call it Jesus—yes, the slave ship Jesus of Lübeck. Call it capitalism. Call it wrong!  Ishmael Reed has given us another opportunity to look behind the curtain. His play makes us laugh while challenging us to rethink everything we thought we knew.

There are only three performances left in the October engagement, which closes Sunday, October 18. Fortunately, The Amanuensis returns November 13, 14, 16, 20, 21 and 22 as part of Black Repertory Group's 64th Mainstage Season.

Don't miss The Amanuensis. Take someone with you. And afterward, talk about what you saw. Because once a wall falls, it is difficult to pretend you cannot see what was behind it.

On November 14, three MacArthur Fellows—Juan Felipe Herrera, Ishmael Reed and Charles Johnson—gather for a free afternoon conversation, Reading and Writing in the Age of AI. Ishmael Reed has invited me to moderate this conversation. What a fitting prelude to Reed's play, which asks us to consider who creates, who owns and who profits from another person's intellectual work.

The Amanuensis is the evening work. It is perfectly situated for reprisal, revival, resurrection.

The check is not in the mail.

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Production notes

The Amanuensis, written by Ishmael Reed

Black Repertory Group
3201 Adeline Street, Berkeley, California

October engagement: Closes Sunday, October 18, 2026.

November return performances: November 13, 14, 16, 20, 21 and 22, 2026, as part of the Black Repertory Group's 64th Mainstage Season.

Creative and technical team

• Director: Bobby Clements

• Stage Manager: LaTarsha McCoy

• Sound, Lighting and Technology: Baron and Austin

• Archival Footage: Ishmael Reed, Jahn Overstreet, Sean Vaughn Scott, Bobby Clements and LaTarsha McCoy

Cast

• John Bramhall — Ghost of Joel Chandler Harris

• Nina Causey — Sis Fox

• LaTarsha McCoy — Aunt Crissy

• Jahn Overstreet — Br'er Rabbit

• Raymond Nat Turner — Uncle Terrell

• Josea Morgan — Old Harbert

• Sherry Davis — Miss Sally

• Emil Guillermo — Narrator

For performance information: Black Repertory Group or (510) 652-2120.

Special FREE Event: Reading and Writing in the Age of AI

Saturday, November 14, 2026, 3–5 p.m.

Admission: FREE

Three MacArthur Fellows in conversation: Juan Felipe Herrera, Ishmael Reed and Charles Johnson.

Moderator: Wanda Sabir, independent scholar, writer, journalist, arts editor emeritus of the San Francisco Bay View newspaper, and host of Wanda's Picks.

Location: Black Repertory Group, 3201 Adeline Street, Berkeley, California.

This conversation is part of Defying Boundaries: MacArthur Fellows at 45. Throughout 2026, the MacArthur Foundation is celebrating the groundbreaking work of its Fellows and inspiring public dialogue through nationwide events and conversations.

Free event registration: Reading and Writing in the Age of AI — Eventbrite

More information: macfound.org/fellows-45

Wanda's Picks Podcast with Deborah Vaughan, Co-founder, Dimensions Dance Theatre

 

Nengi Omuku’s The Gathering, A Reflective Encounter by Wanda Sabir

 

Nengi Omuku’s The Gathering,
A Reflective Encounter

By Wanda Sabir

Nengi Omuku, 2024. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography.

I attended the conversation between Nengi Omuku and curator Natasha Becker virtually. Traffic was prohibitive again crossing the Bay Bridge, but Sunday I got out and was able to spend over an hour in the African Art Gallery with Nengi Omuku’s work.

I enjoyed its conversation with the antiquities. It was like an embrace. Her work centered, the larger elders embraced her.

Nengi Omuku, Gathering, 2020. Oil on sanyan. Collection of spaghetti western, Michael Sherman and Vinny Dotolo.

As I walked through the gallery, I could hear the conversation between Nengi and Natasha playing. Their voices become a soundtrack before you even reach the place where you can sit down and watch the interview.

Musical...

Film: How artist Nengi Omuku paints new worlds

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. The galleries became less a museum than a family reunion.

Yorùbá maker, Pàkà egúngún (ceremonial dance garment), 1930–1970. Cotton, synthetic fibers, vinyl, wood, printed cloth, patchwork, appliqué, embroidery, mirrors, amulets, coins and shell buttons. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

There are several rooms partitioned with Nengi's work and glass panes we can see through to the other sides of the very large and spacious open except where noted room. It is as if the centuries and the dispersed African Diaspora once again gather here to recollect old times.

Nigerian artist Nengi Omuku’s first solo US exhibition, Nengi Omuku: The Gathering, opened at the de Young museum June 27, 2026 and will be up through May 14, 2027.

Omuku’s work is historically and philosophically layered. Using a classical medium as canvas, sanyan, the artist incorporates folk art into a fine arts medium.

Sanyan is cloth traditionally woven from silk and cotton which was used for ceremonial clothing. Omuku first repurposed clothing made from sanyan. Now she employs weavers who make the cloth which the artist has treated so it can hold the oil paints she favors.

Asante weaver, Kente (man’s wrapper), 20th century. Cotton, strip weaving and supplementary weft patterning. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

In a lovely filmed interview, patrons see Omuku paint wearing gloves as she alternately smiles into the camera as she shares how she met the weavers.

Unhurried one feels a deep inhale as the paintings hanging from the ceiling invite speculation.

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.

Nengi Omuku, 2024. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography.

I resonated personally with the artist and her work and the vision of curator Natasha Becker in placing contemporary artists in conversation with these antiquities. I hadn't known until the talk that she is also a Black woman. I have enjoyed all her collaborations. I think I have seen them all.

I loved hearing the curator speak of her time with Nengi Omuku at home. Nengi is a diaspora African returned home changed. She has a vision. I also love it that she grew up in a home with a garden and a gardener.

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 and recover.

She also spoke about growing up in a home where her mother was a horticulturist. After graduate school, she returned home and worked in the family business. Gardens were not simply places of beauty. They were places of work, learning, and livelihood.

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 Gallery in real time.

For real origin stories.

Baga artist, Nimba mask, early 20th century, Guinea. Wood. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

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.

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 wasn't able to travel to northern Nigeria as I knew no one there. I have Yoruba and Fulani ancestry from Northern Nigeria. I wanted to see my heritage sites (smile).

So many philosophical resonances with the Monet in Venice and the Botanical Gardens nearby and the lush landscape that is Golden Gate Park where Lift Every Voice is proclaimed in neon just across the street at the Spreckels Temple of Music (smile).

Remember the 350 African Women Ancestors, dana king’s work?

I was the person who organized the procession and poured libations. I also built the altars, organized the choirs, and hired the women drummers. It was the first Freedom Day in SF. Mayor London Breed officiated.

What a day!

I am interested in art for Social Change and artists as change agents. I think creative tools are how we heal and recover. I appreciate that aspect of Nengi’s work.

Memory is a story we tell ourselves. Sometimes those stories are imported. Sometimes those stories are untrue. Sometimes we need a reset.

The Gathering, oil on the ancestral cloth sanyan, is this reset conversation. The stories are a collective rememory. It is more than recollection and then again it is a collection or opportunity to pause and reflect.

Nengi Omuku, New Haven, 2025. Oil on sanyan. Courtesy of the artist and Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery.

Nengi Omuku, Fire for Fire, 2025. Oil on sanyan. Courtesy of the artist and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London.

As we wait for pandemics to quiet and for petrol to fill yellow buckets 🪣 and fires to quiet and rages to simmer...there they wait in the eternal gardens.

We missed the turn over there, down the road, turned left at the pasture. Circling back now—the signs are missing. We forgot the tune. Mothers stopped humming.

Hum.

Storytime.

Nengi Omuku’s The Gathering is storytime. If you're lost, pull up a chair and listen.

If You Go

Nengi Omuku: The Gathering — de Young museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco. Through May 14, 2027. Museum hours: Tuesday–Sunday, 9:30 a.m.–5:15 p.m.

Tickets and visitor information: de Young tickets

Ticketing and general inquiries: 888-901-6645 (24/7) or 800-777-9996 (daily, 9 a.m.–9 p.m.).

Artwork identifications and interpretive information: de Young / Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco exhibition labels and wall text supplied for Nengi Omuku: The Gathering.

A Quickening of the Heart: Crossings into the Republic of Love, Reflections on Laurie Anderson’s The Republic of Love by Wanda Sabir

 

A Quickening of the Heart: Crossings into the Republic of Love

Reflections on Laurie Anderson’s The Republic of Love
by Wanda Sabir

Official promotional artwork for Laurie Anderson & Sexmob, The Republic of Love Tour, Curran Theatre, San Francisco. Promotional art: folkYEAH!/ATG.

I am so excited to be at this Laurie Anderson concert!

That is what I wrote before The Republic of Love started at the Curran Theatre Friday night.

I am no longer leaving myself behind. I am making myself happy. Making plans, doing the work, taking care of myself—all of me.

When I think about the whole day now, though, I realize the performance had already started before Laurie Anderson walked onto the stage. Or maybe I had already entered the ritual before I entered the theater.

Friday morning I was in a Spirit Rock course with Jill Satterfield, Anxiety: It’s Not All in Your Mind. One of the practices we did was alternate nostril breathing. I had known about the practice before, but I had never really practiced it this way. This time I didn't have to count.

That was liberating.

Usually, when I am doing one of those counted breathing practices—inhale four, hold seven, exhale eight—my mind gets involved. Was that seven? Did I inhale for four? What number am I on? Suddenly I am managing the breath instead of breathing.

This time I could just breathe through the right nostril, pause, exhale through the left, reverse, and follow my body instead of numbers. Releasing the counting took me out of my head and brought me back into my body, which was the whole point.

Jill also defined mettā in a way I had never heard before. She said mettā literally means “a quickening of the heart.”

I like that so much.

Usually we learn mettā through the familiar phrases: May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be free from suffering. Those are beautiful wishes, but language can become mechanical if we aren't careful. A quickening of the heart is a feeling. Something moves. Something responds.

After the workshop I went to my weekly acupuncture appointment. I have been going for a couple of months now, and I asked my practitioner, Is this working?

Oh yes, she said. You look much more relaxed.

Maybe it was the four hours today, I told her.

She laughed.

I hadn't eaten enough, though, and that is another thing I need to put back into my schedule now that autumn is here. The autumn equinox had just passed. The season was turning. Taking care of myself also means remembering to eat. Spiritual practice does not replace lunch.

This body needs food. It needs water. It needs breath and rest.

And I am especially grateful for this body right now.

This is my blue year, dedicated to my kidneys, and it is also my Gratitude @ Five year—five years since my cancer surgery.

I even bought a blue car in December. I am literally swimming in water on wheels.

I had received a chronic kidney disease diagnosis, and that frightened me. Then my numbers changed. Within a remarkably short period of time, I was no longer in that category. My testing was normal, and months later it was still normal.

Wow.

The body is magnificent—its ability to heal, recover, rejuvenate and restore itself.

I don't have any illusions that I will live in this house forever. None of us will. But I am so grateful to be living here right now in this flesh body. I am grateful to my kidneys. I am grateful to my heart, working hecka hard every minute to keep this entire operation together. I am grateful to my lungs, to the ancestors, to the earth and air and water and fire, and to all the feelings and matter that went into my literal manufacture.

And that manufacture isn't finished. Every day I have to eat. Every moment I have to breathe. This body continues to be renewed and restored for as long as it can carry me.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Someone said, “Thank you is a prayer.”

I love that.

Later I was on the bus and BART heading from the East Bay into San Francisco, listening virtually to a CIIS Public Programs event that was actually happening live in San Francisco at that very moment: On Weaving Ritual into Everyday Life: An Evening with Tracee Stanley and Niralli D’Costa. Stanley was talking about her book Living Ritual: Infuse Each Day with Purpose and Spirit and about bringing ritual into ordinary life.

I wasn't physically sitting with the audience, but I was entering San Francisco while they were gathered there. I was moving toward the Curran while listening in real time.

There was even a guided meditation.

I thought that was wonderful. Who expects to be on a bus and BART heading toward a concert while simultaneously participating in a meditation and a conversation on ritual taking place in the very city you are entering?

Tracee Stanley talked about releasing distractions and reclaiming our attention. She talked about creating our own rituals and about the importance of ritual at transitions.

Thresholds. Doorways.

At every threshold, pause and ask:

What do I want to carry forward? What do I want to leave behind?

I really liked that.

I was literally in transit while listening to a conversation about transitions.

We are always crossing something, aren't we?

Life isn't a straight line. It feels more like an intersection of cosmic ideas—as small as a grain of sand, as large as the rock I love that attracts the waters of my heart.

I think about portals too. Ancestors are portals. Memories are portals. Art can be a portal. Places can become portals. To me a portal is a place of transmission. Knowledge, memory, love, grief, story and presence move through.

As the bus carried me toward San Francisco, the sun was setting, and I happened to look out the window and see the moon.

Oh my goodness. Look at the moon.

She was full, big and beautiful, an orangish color against the evening sky. I hadn't gone looking for her. I just happened to look up.

The moon returns inside while Anderson plays her virtual violin. The Republic of Love. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

That is attention too, isn't it? Maybe that is also ritual: noticing what has arrived.

By the time I reached the Curran, I was still listening to Tracee Stanley and Niralli D’Costa. Stanley talked about dharma as that which nourishes and sustains us and asked us to look at our lives—jobs, careers, commitments—and ask, Is this nourishing and sustaining? She spoke about personal and collective dharma, gratitude rituals, geography, noticing who shares the spaces where we live, and even growing an ancestral herb.

I have to think about that ancestral herb. What would that be on my motherline? What did the women grow, cook with, steep, rub on the body, keep near the house?

All of that was entering the theater with me.

I had not been to the Curran in decades. I remembered coming there when I was a student at UC Berkeley studying Ibsen in Comparative Literature. We were reading a collection of his plays, and I came to the Curran to see either Hedda Gabler or A Doll's House. I honestly don't remember which one now, but when I walked into the theater Friday night, that younger Wanda walked in with me.

This is what I mean when I talk about places as portals. You enter a building and another time becomes present.

I looked up at that gorgeous ceiling and chandelier. The columns, paintings, red carpets, blue, gold. I took pictures and zoomed in so I could really see the details.

Inside the Curran Theatre before the performance. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

I was seated in the accessible seating, and I really liked my chair. It was more comfortable and much easier to get up from. The drummer was partially obscured from where I sat, but I could see most of the musicians.

Accessibility has become part of the way I participate in media now because of my audio description training, and The Republic of Love struck me as an extraordinarily accessible performance.

Laurie did not depend upon one sensory pathway to communicate an idea. Huge images appeared behind her. Words moved across the screen, sometimes repeating. Laurie read the words aloud. She named people and told stories. Image, text, speech, sound, music and body were all working together. There were multiple ways into the piece.

And the musicians were phenomenal.

Laurie was joined by Sexmob and guests, and these were not musicians sitting quietly behind a storyteller. They were part of the storytelling. Steven Bernstein was on trumpet; Briggan Krauss on saxophone; Doug Wieselman on guitar and woodwinds; Tony Scherr on bass; Kenny Wollesen on drums and percussion; and Mazz Swift and Christina Courtin played violin and sang. Laurie herself was another percussionist of sorts with all her electronics.

The sound was huge.

Steven Bernstein on trumpet with members of the ensemble. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

I couldn't see Kenny Wollesen well from where I was sitting, and I also couldn't see Mazz Swift from that part of the stage, but I could certainly hear all that was happening. The musicians moved between instruments and textures so fluidly that sometimes I wasn't even sure where a sound was coming from. Wieselman moved between guitar and woodwinds, including that wonderfully deep clarinet sound. There was also this huge saxophone—or what looked huge from where I sat. Swift and Courtin's violins and voices added another whole layer.

And then there was this long, haunting trumpet solo.

Steven Bernstein had been onstage just behind Laurie playing trumpet throughout the evening, so I knew who he was. What surprised me was where he suddenly was. Somehow he had moved over to the part of the stage that was harder for me to see. I don't know how he got over there.

The stage had gotten dark, and at first he was almost a silhouette. Then that eerie, echoing trumpet stretched out into the theater as the light came up around him. It was hecka beautiful.

When the solo ended, he moved back toward the ensemble.

Later, near the end of the concert, I watched him take on another role, cueing and directing the musicians as the sound gathered momentum and the photographs and names moved across the screen behind them.

That was one of the things that made the ensemble so phenomenal. They were not only strong individual players; they were shaping the movement of the whole piece together.

What a band.

At the beginning Laurie also showed us some of the people who were going to be part of the discourse—thinkers, artists, teachers and beloveds whose counsel she would draw upon in constructing this Republic of Love.

I don't want to call them “voices” because that isn't quite what they were. Some may have literally appeared through recordings or songs, but many didn't. I think of them as a council.

Gertrude Stein. Bob Dylan. Allen Ginsberg. Pema Chödrön. Her husband, Lou Reed. Her dog. Friends, teachers, artists, beloveds. Some living, some dead.

They offered counsel.

What principles would need to be present in a Republic of Love?

Maybe every republic needs a declaration. We have a Declaration of Independence. What would a Declaration for a Republic of Love say?

Laurie gave us some possibilities.

We don't rank love.

I loved that.

She spoke with Chicago pride about the Pope—“Bob”—and challenged the idea that love should operate in concentric circles: family first, then neighbors, then city, then country, while everybody else sits farther and farther away from the center.

No.

We don't rank love.

Then there were the three rules Laurie and Lou Reed arrived at:

Don't be afraid of anyone.

Get a really good bullshit detector.

Be really, really tender.

Sounds like the beginning of a constitution to me.

And maybe that first principle is not telling us that fear never appears. Fear is part of being alive. The question is whether we let fear govern us.

We can respond in fear, or we can respond with love.

I like with love better than “out of love.” People have justified all kinds of things by saying they did them out of love. To act with love asks something different of us. What quality is present in the action? Is there care? Tenderness? Recognition of another person's humanity? Are we helping, or are we simply reacting to our own fear?

Laurie told a story that gave this idea a body.

She was in Frankfurt after performing a solo show. She went back to her hotel and tried to go to bed, but there was something happening downstairs. She got dressed again and went to investigate. When she reached the gathering she realized she was underdressed. People were in elegant evening clothes, but it wasn't exactly a party. They weren't down there dancing.

She asked what was happening.

It was a fundraiser for New York firefighters after September 11—to help replace equipment lost in the response and to help the firefighters and their families.

Frankfurt. New York. Across an ocean.

Something terrible had happened in one city, and hearts quickened in another.

That story stayed with me because Laurie had also been talking about borders. National borders were closing, she said, barriers were being erected between countries, and yet cities remained connected to cities. As an artist she doesn't necessarily think, I'm going to Germany; she thinks about the city she is going to. There is an urban circuit, a cultural network carried through music, dance, fashion, film and the visual arts, almost like a Silk Road that artists travel. It is important, she said, to keep that circuit open.

I love that.

And the Frankfurt story shows what can travel along that circuit besides art.

Care can travel. Compassion can travel. Love can travel city to city.

Imagine how different our responses to suffering might be if the first question were not, What force can we deploy? but, How can we help? What does this person, this community, this nation need? What would it mean to respond with love instead of allowing fear to decide what happens next?

Pema Chödrön was also one of the people pictured at the beginning. I was right when I first thought the image was of a woman. I know her work—I have her books and her Compassion Cards—so recognizing her among Laurie’s council delighted me.

Later Laurie shared a teaching from Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche about practicing how to feel sadness without actually becoming sad. We don't pretend the suffering isn't there. There are too many terrible things happening in the world for that. We acknowledge them without allowing sadness to swallow us whole.

Maybe that belongs in the declaration too.

Then there was the technology.

Wow.

Laurie touched her body and I heard electronic sound amplified from her gestures. I immediately thought: Hambone.

That was hecka important to me.

Hambone is us. It is an African and African American body-percussion tradition, the body carrying rhythm when perhaps there was no drum, or when the body itself was the drum. Laurie was riffing on that tradition. She had mechanized it, electronically amplified it, sent it through circuitry, but I could hear what was underneath.

The body as percussion. The body as instrument.

She mechanized Hambone, but she didn't erase it.

That was us in there.

Then she played what looked like an invisible violin, but she really was playing through electronic circuitry. I didn't know that either.

Laurie Anderson playing violin. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

She is such a genius.

Meanwhile, all through the concert I was going back and forth with AI on my phone.

Who is this?

What did she mean by that?

What is SI?

I knew what AI was. SI was new to me, so I looked it up: Synthetic Intelligence.

Who wrote “Language is a Virus”?

So there I was consulting artificial intelligence in real time while Laurie Anderson was onstage talking about synthetic intelligence, automated language, William Burroughs and Gertrude Stein.

Talk about a loop.

Laurie called Stein a kind of mother of AI, while I was asking AI what Laurie meant by SI.

That's funny.

And somehow it fits.

Technology in Laurie's hands didn't remove the body. It amplified it. A touch became sound. Gesture became music. The invisible violin became audible. And an African diasporic body-percussion form could still be heard beneath electronic circuitry.

She also introduced Mazz Swift, whom I began researching during the performance. I became fascinated by their work with Sankofa and ancestral music: going backward to retrieve what is necessary for the present.

Fetch it.

That is Sankofa.

Go back and get what we need—not nostalgia, but resource. Memory. Spiritual technology.

I realized Laurie was doing something like that all evening too. She was fetching people, teachings, memories and stories.

She told us about her uncle Allen, who came back from the war in France traumatized, before PTSD had been named that way. As a child she heard him screaming night after night. France became, in the imagination of young Laurie, the place where something terrible had happened to her uncle.

And then one day, after years, he stopped screaming. He came downstairs. He went out. He got a job and eventually married and had a family.

That story stayed with me.

What crosses a threshold with us?

Sometimes we get to choose what to carry. Sometimes we don't. Trauma crosses too. Memory crosses.

But so does life.

Laurie kept changing the scale of things. One human being. A family. A city. A nation. The entire Earth.

There was that huge image of the planet rotating. Earth—giant, magnificent, and yet home.

She sang about home.

There was water too. Rain on glass. Rain on trees, almost a glade. And then floodwater.

The flood sequence was long, and I thought about Mississippi, New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. I didn't take pictures during that part. I didn't want to live with those images afterward.

Sometimes witnessing is enough. You don't have to possess everything you see.

Later there was openness again, something that felt like hope. Not pretending the flood didn't happen, but not drowning forever either.

Earlier that day Jill had given me that definition of mettā: a quickening of the heart.

After the concert I saw a man I think I had also seen earlier in the week near the Opera House. His body is permanently bent over, almost as though he is bowing to the earth. He cannot look straight ahead. His eyes necessarily face the ground.

It was cold.

I wondered where he was going and whether he had shelter, and I sent him a little mettā.

Not a mechanical recitation. A quickening of the heart.

I had seen him. Something in me responded.

Maybe that is citizenship in a Republic of Love too.

On my way toward BART I heard people talking about the concert. Years ago you could recognize who had attended the same performance because people carried programs. You saw that program in somebody's hand and immediately knew: Oh, you were there too!

And I would start a conversation because, of course, I do those things.

Now we don't necessarily have that physical object identifying us as part of the temporary community, but I heard people talking, and The Republic of Love was still moving through the streets.

The concert had ended, but it hadn't stopped.

At the end of the performance, Laurie brought everything back into the body.

She invited us to do Tai Chi.

Twenty-one movements.

The whole theater was moving: people in front, people farther back, people upstairs in the balcony where I had once sat in the late 1970s. Bodies moving together.

Laurie talked about the forms and how Lou Reed, who practiced Tai Chi seriously, had helped give the complicated movements simpler names that were easier to remember. One became “carrying the pizza.” Another carried the reminder: have no weapons.

And there was something else in what she was teaching that stayed with me: you don't have to know a practice perfectly before you begin.

You can go through the motions. You can rehearse the movement.

At first it may feel unfamiliar, even artificial. But if there is sincerity there, if the practice resonates with your heart, repetition changes you.

I think of that as embodied rehearsal.

The body can practice something before the mind is completely comfortable with it. Eventually what felt borrowed begins to belong to you.

That is what had happened with my breathing that very morning. I practiced the form until I could stop thinking about the form and simply breathe.

Mettā is like that too. We begin with words somebody teaches us—May you be happy. May you be safe—and perhaps one day the words become more than words. The heart quickens.

Maybe tenderness has to be rehearsed too. Maybe not ranking love takes practice. Maybe nonviolence takes practice. Maybe responding with love rather than allowing fear to govern us takes practice.

A Republic of Love would not exist simply because its citizens agreed that love was a good idea.

We would have to practice living there.

My day had begun with breath practice designed to take me out of my head and into my body, and the performance ended with an entire theater practicing movement together.

Final bows at the Curran. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

Afterward I turned to one of the security women standing nearby and told her how lovely it had been. She said Laurie had done something similar the last time she was there.

“You've seen her before?”

Oh yeah.

And immediately I thought: Oh my goodness. She might come back.

Return.

I think about returns a lot lately. Endings that aren't always endings. Doors that close and then open again. Artists we encounter more than once. Places we return to carrying different versions of ourselves.

I first encountered Laurie Anderson's Songs from the Bardo maybe six years ago during one of the Sunday gatherings I was attending. A therapist whose husband had just died chose not to cancel her presentation, and the gathering became a reflection on death and how death isn't necessarily something to fear. Someone in a breakout room mentioned the bardo and Laurie Anderson and shared information in the chat. I was doing what I always do—looking things up while listening—and encountered those gorgeous images from Grace Cathedral and Laurie's work.

Oh my goodness, so beautiful.

That work stayed with me. It opened a discourse with my soul about death, impermanence and the other side.

I have had my own close encounters with mortality since then, so I have fewer illusions. But I also have a lot of gratitude.

Before I left home Friday evening, a package had arrived in the mail.

bell hooks.

Communion: The Female Search for Love.

It was the last book I needed to complete the trilogy with All About Love and Salvation: Black People and Love. I couldn't even get the stiff packaging open because I had to leave for the concert.

And then I went to something called The Republic of Love.

Come on now.

Sometimes the ancestors are not subtle.

bell hooks talks about love. Martin King imagined the Beloved Community. Thích Nhất Hạnh built Plum Village. Pema Chödrön teaches compassion. Mingyur Rinpoche teaches a relationship to suffering that does not require despair. Cornel West connects justice and love. Laurie Anderson gathers a council.

Different traditions. Different languages. Different forms.

Yet sometimes I think the good people—the people who pay attention, the people of conscience—keep arriving at some of the same places.

How do we live together? How do we stop abandoning one another? How do we stop abandoning ourselves? How do we remain tender? How do we remember? How do we pay attention?

Late that night I finally crossed back into the East Bay. It was windy and hecka cold, and we had quite a while to wait for the AC Transit bus.

The driver had gone away to do whatever he needed to do during his break. Then he came back while there was still time left before departure and opened the doors so we could sit inside.

The heater wasn't on.

It didn't matter.

It was so much better than standing out there in that wind.

Such a small kindness, yet that is what love looks like too. Someone notices that other people are cold and opens a door.

There was that threshold again, but this time it wasn't metaphorical. A door opened and we stepped from the cold into shelter.

And now this whole weekend continues. Tomorrow I am going to the Monterey Jazz Festival, and then I will drive back and go hiking at Point Lobos.

More music. More landscape. More crossings.

The autumn equinox has just passed. The full moon was hanging over my journey into San Francisco. John Coltrane's centennial birth week is here. I am in this flesh body that has carried me through illness and recovery and five years of gratitude, and I am not leaving myself behind anymore.

I am making plans. I am going places. I am feeding myself—literally and otherwise.

I am alive, and it feels like a good time to be alive.

Maybe gratitude itself is a portal. Maybe “thank you” really is a prayer.

And maybe every time the heart quickens toward another being—an ancestor, a stranger, the moon, a musician, a bus driver, a teacher, a tired miraculous body, this beautiful Earth—we find ourselves crossing another threshold into the Republic of Love. The band heads to Santa Cruz Saturday night to a sold-out engagement.

Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, A Review by Wanda Sabir

Wanda Sabir and devorah major with Mildred Howard’s oversized $100 bill at OMCA.
Photo: Wanda Sabir.

Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, OMCA entrance, with inset portrait of Howard in her first Oakland studio, circa 1978. Entrance photo: Wanda Sabir. Portrait: Raymond Holbert; courtesy of Raymond Holbert. Collage assembled for this review.

devorah major and I pose in front of Mildred Howard’s oversized $100 bill. When do you see a Black woman on a hundred-dollar bill? Like, what? Black woman currency—Holla!

We enter the exhibition. “Locks and Keys for Harry Bridges” (2001) opens another story—labor. An older woman in the gallery comments to her friend that she knew Harry Bridges. I think to myself, I bet Brother Cleophas knew him too. Later I learn so much more from the ILWU archives and from Sister Sadie Williams, Brother Cleophas’s widow and Ms. Howard’s mother’s friend. From labor we walk into Howard’s reflection. We meet her here in the early work—self-portraits, textiles, works on paper and wood.

In “Untitled (self-portrait),” c. 1979, lace partially covers Howard’s face. There is a photo of Howard dressed in a garment her mother gifted her. Ancestral antiquity passed to her mother from her mother—Howard’s maternal grandmother. Howard dresses history. She grew into her vocation surrounded by antiques and adults who knew their value and taught their daughter through their example her worth. Her personal appraisal was all that mattered. The world would sell her cheap had she let it. She didn’t, nor did she allow it to sell her ibeji or twins cheap either. In Ifá or Yoruba culture, Ibeji or twin spirits are divine beings. Equal pay for equal work, she told the agency that hired her daughter and son and their mother as artist models.

Howard says this story belongs to a people she belongs to, so it’s hers to tell. 81 this year, I think about the places her life and work intersect with this writer's life. I retired after 25 years teaching at College of Alameda where I was one of two tenured Black English Composition and Reading faculty. Now there are none. I retired three years ago. It was one of the happiest days of my life. When I got tenure it was also one of the happiest days of my life. I could take care of my two daughters. That was important to me. Though our paths didn't cross there, Ms. Howard studied fashion design at COA while she raised her ibeji or twins.

If only I knew now what I learned at the end of my tenure. These institutions are not interested in Black liberation. Mildred Howard is.

Her mom bore ten children. The family migrated from Texas to San Francisco, then moved to South Berkeley. The antiques business moved across geographies as the youngest child learned appraisal and appreciation. Her home had old things in it, her friends commented.

I think it might be a Southern thing. My mother had an aesthetic I saw in other homes. I saw this aesthetic in the homes of my Senegalese family too. Photos of historic figures, scriptural tapestries, covered sofas and armchairs, a large rug, coffee table, maybe beads or a sheer curtain hanging in a doorway. The rooms were full even when humanly empty. There was texture in the air.

Presence, character, the space felt alive. Often a guest could smell food cooking, a welcoming smell.

Like my grandmother, born in 1901, Howard’s parents belonged to a generation whose parents might have been born during slavery.

Mildred Howard in the exhibition’s early-work/self-portrait gallery.
Photo: Wanda Sabir.

Black community is important to Howard. We see this in the family photos and albums, her Berkeley High School yearbook. My younger daughter was class of 2000. “The Other Side of the Coin” (2014) reminded me of the Amazon Queen, Queen Califia, for whom our state takes its name, and of course, Black Gold—Califia’s people. Howard inserts her own silhouette where the racist “Gold Dust Twins” caricature once appeared. Then there is “A Salute to Sojourner: Still Waters Run Deep” (2001).

Remember the Black Doll experiment? Well, in this retelling, the pretty Black doll is the “fairest of them all.” The mirror is right there. When you look at the Black doll, you are looking at yourself. So what do you think? Is she beautiful? And you’re looking at yourself, right? So am I beautiful? She’s not passing. She is very, very melanated. You know she is a Black girl. You can’t look at it and not think about it.

Wanda Sabir and devorah major looking into Howard’s work in the gallery.
Photo: Wanda Sabir.

There is “Skillet to the Frying Pan: Sitting Black” (2001)—a black skillet with a mirror on it. Who’s calling whom Black? (smile).

One of my favorite pieces is “Volume I & II: History of the United States with a Few Missing Parts” (2007). The two open American history books are riddled with holes. They look like bullet holes to me. Funny. I wonder how she made the holes in the document? Was it target practice? Nearby is “Blind Thomas Green at the White House” (2024), a White House constructed of glass bottles and wood.

Mildred Howard, Volume I & II: History of the United States with a Few Missing Parts (2007), detail. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

Today at Chochenyo Park as we practiced Qigong forms, poured qi into our crown chakra, I looked up into the Magnolia trees where several blossoms sat upon fragrant altars too far above to reach. Howard has “The Magnolia Project: III” (2008). In a mixed-media portrait, we see another self-portrait embedded in a tree.

I am just riffing on OMCA. Miss my friend Hubert Collins. Miss Arthur Monroe. Miss Raymond Saunders. Hubert introduced me to both men. He told me I needed to interview Saunders. Who knew Saunders would teach my younger daughter and be the faculty sponsor of the club she started at California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC)—BAAD: Black Artists And Designers? Howard taught there too, but wasn’t tenured. I asked my daughter if she had any classes with her. It was a vicarious moment that bore no fruit (smile). Yet, little did we know about Howard’s work with the Edible Schoolyard. TaSin attended Oxford Elementary School, where there was an early school garden program. Later, I taught at Jefferson Elementary School, another Berkeley school with an edible garden.

TaSin was a girl when we went to Saunders’ retrospective at OMCA, June 11–August 21, 1994. I was telling my friend devorah today that on Sundays we’d go to the OM. Admission was free on Sundays. These were happy days spent with my daughter cultivating a shared love of art. This was over 30 years ago. Loved the OM then and now. Even with its recent architectural changes, it remains one of my favorite museums.

I didn’t see Raymond Saunders’ painting today in the Art Gallery on the upper level. I just wanted to say hi. I did run into a Sargent Johnson sculpture. devorah said her dad, Reggie Major (Asé), knew Johnson, Charles White, Bob Kaufman too. They’d all get together for fun and mischief as only erudite Black Brothers could. She recalled a story where the men went to see Nina Simone. These men affirmed Blackness in these segregated spaces. Simone appreciated seeing them there. I was like wow! when devorah shared her historic legacy. I’d met her father through a mutual friend, Kiilu Nyasha. His book, “A Panther Is a Black Cat,” was on her table. I don’t remember if she called him on the phone, but I remember speaking with him. Love the play on the word “cat.” “Cat” as in Black man per parlance.

Later devorah and I walked up to the Dorothea Lange exhibit. Many familiar faces greeted me there. The OM is home to the Lange archive. In “Dorothea Lange: Photography as Activism,” located in the California History Gallery on the upper level, there was an exercise in perspective we played with. The photo on the table had five Black men with a white man interrupting the fluid discourse across the canvas. Was he necessary or a distraction? We took one of the two frames and excised him. The mood shifted on the canvas to one of camaraderie.

Perspective is thesis.

Howard’s early-career gallery, with Black Has Always Been a Color (2024) shown in Wanda Sabir’s
close-up at left.  Photos: Wanda Sabir.

Gallery view with patrons watching Howard’s public-art video. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

The Howard gallery proceeds into the next smaller gallery. It is like an artist’s studio. Here are the notebooks, photos and other artifacts that illustrate Howard’s life. Her artistic query questions as it answers. Love her curiosity. It is her theme song. Similar to her secret powers of insight and creative reuse. She has been a “maker” all her life. It is also where patrons can sit and watch a short video depicting Howard’s stunning public works—a very short list.

Locks and Keys for Harry Bridges (2001) appears in the video—keys where parking meters would stand, open locks—at Third and Stevenson Streets in San Francisco. Curiosity is there too, at the San Leandro Main Library—a giant bronze question mark, with Quincy Troupe’s poem about curiosity on the wall.

A library is a place where we have questions, and our curiosity takes us into the library to investigate further what we don’t know, what we know, to confirm what we know, and to question what we know, because maybe we don’t know what we think we know. Not seen is “Three Shades of Blue” (2002) in San Francisco, beautiful clear blue glass across the multiple-lane thoroughfare at Geary and Fillmore. Quincy Troupe's poem, “Shades of Blue for a Blue Bridge,” dedicated to Mildred Howard, Joe Rudolph and Yori Wada dances across its surface. Nor is The Music of Language (2008) at Glide Memorial, Howard’s beautiful collaboration with poet Janice Mirikitani. However, these works live here. Somebody could actually go to that street in San Francisco and see that artwork. Somebody could actually go to the San Leandro Library and see that artwork. Even after the exhibit closes, her work lives on.

Gallery view with patrons watching Howard’s public-art video. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

Howard has been busy. She has so much work. She works monstrous, enormous, bigger than life. Music is an important element to Howard’s composition. One of her many commentaries available via QR code speaks to this. I love Ms. Howard’s collaborative work with Joanna Haigood and Marcus Shelby; Quincy Troupe and David Murray. The latter two with Howard are a creative dream team.

We turn around and enter the grand opus. The room has twilight-kind of lighting. To the left is Crossings (1997). I think about Howard’s revisioning of the iconic image of African Ancestors packed like boards or sardines in a vacuum-sealed can. These eggs arranged so precisely recall a ship deck...recall the flesh bodies dismembered, robbed of life, rights, agency.

The large, twilight-lit gallery in Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, with Wanda Sabir’s Fort Point view inset at upper right.
Photos: Wanda Sabir.

The gilded mirror is across from the eggs—the slave ship. The reflection extends or magnifies as it includes one in the journey—its terror and ode to survival. We are an amazing people; however, we bleed, die, suffer just like the onlookers.

The eggs represent the fragility that is life, Black life and how little it matters. Yet, seen here in its elemental form—all life comes from this fertilized embryo. How did we survive the journey? How do we continue to survive this horrendous passage without breakage? We are but flesh and blood. Howard says we have to continue to look at these things. Don’t look away.

To the right and ahead is the blue glass house, “Blackbird in a Red Sky” (a.k.a. “Fall of the Blood House”) (2002). I looked at the glass house and saw my mother’s childhood home in Mississippi—three rooms with an outdoor toilet and kitchen. I started writing a story after I left the house and swimming apples: So many stories live in sweet red 🍎. Poison, beauty, secrets...then there is the house made of glass and no tree. Its absence is singularly noticeable. Where is the parent or life that gave these apples life? But then these glassy apples are for show, for company, not for use.

The precision. The lines. 6x13 hum. 78 🍎

Lit, the red apples float like lanterns. There is a room near the larger glass house where patrons are encouraged to share their stories. There were lots of stories there. And there is a large statue covered in red cloth.

I’d seen Howard’s work at Fort Point—the three criminals wrapped in red cloth. They stood as sentinels along the open decks or passages. When a person looked up at the structure there they stood: curiosities. The three men were Peter Burnett, William Gwin and Francis Scott Key. Howard shrouded monuments to men whose histories included the enslavement of Black people and the exclusion of Black people’s rights.

Crossings (1997) echoing Crossings: Wanda Sabir’s gallery view with a smaller complete view of the installation. Gallery photo:Wanda Sabir.  Installation photo: Lewis Watts.

In gallery view with Blackbird in a Red Sky (a.k.a. Fall of the Blood House) (2002) inset.
Gallery photo: Wanda Sabir; Blackbird image courtesy of the artist / OMCA press materials.

The red carries urgency. It is also life—blood, water, collective breath. And across the back of this large gallery is Moving Stills (2025).

Howard says the film footage is hers. She took it when she visited family in Texas—I think she said she traveled there by train. Her mother saved the film, and Howard found it years later. I don’t remember where she said she found it. Now those images move across the paneled lace curtains spanning the back of the large gallery. I stood there for a long time gazing at Moving Stills. The lace curtain was no longer decoration. It had become an archive.

Moving Stills across the lace-curtain installation in the large gallery, with Untitled (1979) inset at right. Gallery photo: Wanda Sabir. Untitled courtesy of the artist.

In another gallery is one of Howard's bottle houses.

I am not a stranger to Mildred Howard’s work. I have been blessed to see a lot of her exhibitions, many at the OM, others at the Richmond Art Center and the San Jose Museum of Art. I remember Howard’s Richmond Art Center exhibition: “Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter,” a four-decade survey guest curated by Jan Wurm. It opened March 22, 2015, and closed May 24, 2015. I had seen the exhibition earlier, but I returned on the closing-day reception, “And Then There Were None,” Sunday, May 24. Howard was there. I also ran into Ms. Howard at the BAMPFA, where she was a part of a group exhibition, “About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging,” at BAMPFA, May 17–July 21, 2019. “Safe House” (2005) showed up in both spots. Black folks do not take safety or homefulness for granted.

I interviewed her in her Berkeley studio in connection with the Richmond Art Center exhibition. This was before she lost that studio to gentrification and moved to her West Oakland site. Lucky for us. Howard always recognized and greeted me when our paths crossed.

I remember her contributions to the Día de los Muertos exhibitions at the Oakland Museum too, especially her 2003 work about the handgun deaths of Black people in Oakland, most between 15 and 30 years old. I remember standing there looking at the map with handgun-shaped pushpins marking the deaths.

I like all the storytelling with QR codes. Material culture is her palette and Black American culture colors everything.

Ms. Howard is a rock star. Seriously, she has made such an impact on this American landscape. She is such a gift. I don’t know why she hasn’t gotten a MacArthur Fellowship or the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her collected body of work, but this oversight needs correcting. She needs the MacArthur because it comes with money. The work she does, the skill she does it with, the material culture she resurrects and excavates—it costs money. Being an art-keologist is an expensive business.

I tend to go back to exhibitions on closing day. The Richmond Art Center exhibition wasn’t my first visit, but I went back for the closing and found Mildred Howard there. Poetics of Memory closes October 18. Maybe I’ll see the artist there again. That would be hecka lovely.

For OMCA information, visit museumca.org.