Mildred Howard creates works in a variety of mediums that examine issues of race, gender, and global politics. Born in San Francisco, Howard was educated and has worked for most of her career in the Bay Area. She received her MFA in 1985 in textile arts, a field traditionally deemed “more appropriate” for women than painting or sculpture (the same was true for other women artists of Howard’s generation, including Maren Hassinger and Barbara Kasten, among others). From the beginning of her professional career in the 1980s, however, Howard situated herself in the fine art world, particularly within the California assemblage tradition in terms of materials, Bay Area Funk art in terms of droll wit, and California conceptualism in terms of using the mundane to visualize abstract ideas.
On the Rebound is one of a number of globe-based works Howard made in 2010 addressing various social concerns. The basketball theme of this assemblage evokes the world of young Black (generally male) athletes—connecting it to Barkley Hendricks’ basketball paintings of 1967-70, David Hammons’ “basketball drawings” of the 2000s, and Mark Bradford’s 2003 short film, Practice, among other works—while the title alludes not only to basketball but also to dating and even marrying habits of young people, typically women. The globe itself looks as if it is caught in a basketball hoop (which in fact is not a hoop but the globe’s stand), with the north pole oriented sideways rather than upwards, thus suggesting that things globally are out of proper alignment. Howard considers herself “a citizen of the world,” and the globe represents both possibilities and limitations to her. “I can’t stand the thought of borders,” she has stated. “We all occupy this world, why can’t we move freely wherever we want to go? If I want to go somewhere else, I should be able to get up and go. I just can’t stand the idea that because there’s this artificial line that’s drawn, I can’t go to another place. Wars have been fought and lines have been drawn over religion, tea, sugar, oil…it’s ridiculous.
