Mildred Howard at Richmond Art Center: Wide range of moods
Recent events have forced mainstream media to pay unprecedented attention to the jeopardy that African Americans, especially men, face at the hands of the criminal justice system.
The backbeat of social injustice has always made itself felt in Howard’s art, though she has seldom let social concern outweigh the specifics of viewers’ encounter with artworks’ at-hand reality.
Howard has studded two walls of the corridor entrance to the Richmond Art Center with embedded shell casings in floor-to-ceiling grids to form an installation titled “Ten Little Children Standing in a Line, One Got Shot and Then There Were Nine” (2015).
Howard has frequently worked by repositioning ordinary objects and materials so as to generate unforeseen meanings and force, and “Ten Little Children” counts as a pure instance of her methods.
A piece such as “U.S. Savings Bonds and Westside Court 3” (1981) typifies her use of old photos and other documents to evoke the inextricability, and perhaps irrecoverability, of social and personal history.
Howard mingles this homage with another, to Marcel Duchamp’s second life as a chess adept, staging a confrontation across a fur-lined chessboard of pieces consisting of salt and pepper shakers.
Racial politics and Dadaist feminism filtered through modern art legend in a key of worldly-wise humor — who but Howard could do that?
Works from Brady’s ongoing “Language Series” command attention here, despite being some of the smallest pieces on view.
The analogy has to work — and it does — only to the extent of prolonging viewers’ attention to the objects until the appeal of their structural invention and masterly aesthetic finish can make itself felt.
Several large wall pieces in wood have almost the stamped-out aspect of some of Ellsworth Kelly’s wall sculptures, though Brady is more willing than Kelly to insinuate references to architecture, costume and common objects such as a comb and a bell.
In three large standing pieces, the most powerful titled “Bode” (2015), Brady returns to the creature narrative implicit in some of his earlier work.
Bode” describes — though “describe” may be too strong a word — a network of eel-like fish locking jaws and tails in an open cycle reminiscent, in its hint of human symbolism, of the madcap macabre of Samuel Beckett’s “How It Is.