Half a century ago, artist Mildred Howard was given a warning by Mable Howard, a well-known South Berkeley community organizer and activist.

“My mother said, ‘Watch. These people who are running away from us are going to get sick of commuting and come back, buy up this property and you won’t be able to live here,’” Mildred Howard remembers her mother saying.

Howard, who is 71, has been thinking about that lately as she packs up her live/work studio off Adeline Street, around the corner from where she grew up.

A doubling of her rent is forcing out Berkeley’s beloved homegrown artist, a woman so revered she was honored by a city proclamation five years ago. Unable to find anything affordable, she is leaving the city where she attended public schools, up through Berkeley High, class of 1963, on her way to a career as a sculptor and public artist.

“So much for having March 29 as Mildred Howard Day,” she says, a few days before Christmas, as she sits at her desk boxing up glassware. “I really thought I would be in the People’s Republic of Berkeley all my life.”

It is an old story, the diaspora of the working artists. But when gentrification hits a living landmark like Howard, it is symbolic enough that a documentary filmmaker is on hand to record the sad procession. Nashormeh Lindo of the California Arts Council also drops in to show her support.

“It highlights this problem that a lot of artists are living in unconventional places because they can’t afford the rents,” says Lindo. “Even an artist of Mildred’s stature has to get out of her space.”

Howard has a master’s of fine arts and has taught art at Stanford and the San Francisco Art Institute, while raising twins as a single mother. For 25 years she has been represented by the prestigious Gallery Paule Anglim (now Anglim Gilbert), but she never could afford to both buy property and be an artist.

Howard has had to move twice before when buildings have been sold out from under her. But she’s always found something in town, and for the last 18 years she has lived and worked in a one-story brick box that was once the storage room for South Berkeley Hardware.

It is a legal live/work unit, and Howard doesn’t separate her living space from her working space. Here she has created some of the most visible works of public art in the Bay Area, most prominently in San Francisco.

Anybody who has been stuck in the international terminal at SFO has probably counted the 130 saxophones attached to the wall in her piece “Salty Peanuts,” an homage to Charlie Parker and the song “Salt Peanuts.” Anybody who has traveled out Geary Boulevard has seen “Three Shades of Blue,” which spans the Fillmore Street underpass.

If you’ve walked up Mason Street from Market, you’ve no doubt seen the “Word Project,” letters affixed to the front of the Glide housing complex to form inspirational phrases for the residents.

“Amazing grace wakes us to the beauty of this home” is the phrase that seems most relevant just now.

“What is it about home that compels one to make art that addresses that whole issue?” she says. “That’s a question I have been grappling with in a lot of my work.”

Back to Gallery Berkeley’s beloved homegrown artist Mildred Howard... 2 1 of 2 Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle 2 of 2 Photo: Photo: Genevieve Masse



Howard’s first home was in the Western Addition of San Francisco. Her dad, Rolly Howard, was a longshoreman, and her mom was a ship painter who helped get women into the union, earning the friendship and admiration of the famous labor leader Harry Bridges.

By the end of World War II, there were 10 kids in the Howard family, so they bought a four-bedroom house in South Berkeley, a mixed neighborhood.

Ironically, it was her mother, Mable, known around town as Mama Howard, who did more than anyone else to boost property values here. Back in the 1960s, when BART was being mapped, Berkeley passed a bond to require the Richmond line to go underground within the city limits. But a stipulation allowed the line to continue above ground from the Oakland line past South Berkeley before dropping into the tunnel.

Mama Howard found out about this and spearheaded a lawsuit to stop the above-ground tracks, this “Berlin Wall that would have divided the city,” Howard says. Construction halted for nine months of litigation before BART agreed to underground the line.

In her honor, a subsidized rental complex for seniors was named the Mable Howard Apartments.

Howard’s home is about three blocks from the city limit, and she hears only a faint hum when the BART train passes underground. She can thank her mother for that and thank her landlord for letting her last here as long as he has.

The building has 13-foot ceilings, which is great for creating and hanging art. And she is the sole tenant, a great situation until it goes bad. Single-occupancy buildings are exempt from rent-control protection.

“I don’t own it, so people can put you out whenever they get ready,” she says. “It was always lingering. I just didn’t think it was going to happen.”

The trauma has slowed down her creative process, but nothing can stop it. Even while desperately seeking a new space, she has contributed work to exhibitions under way at museums in Eugene, Ore., and Alexandria, La. In January, she will be part of a group show at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, and she is at work on a public art project for bus stops served by AC Transit.

“My work has saved me,” she says. What has also saved her is an old friend from Berkeley High School. At the 11th hour the friend, whom she declines to name, offered her a loft space in West Oakland.

“I’m lucky because an angel came to my rescue,” she says. “He’s another artist, so he understands that artists need space in order to make a living.” She moves to Oakland in March, right around the anniversary of Mildred Howard Day in Berkeley.

She’s tried living in Oakland once before and it didn’t take. But she’s philosophical about trying it again.

“Art is about facing those obstacles that are difficult,” she says, as her two grandsons begin taking 18 years of stuff off her walls.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Instagram: @sfchronicle_art

To see Mildred Howard say farewell to South Berkeley: http://bit.ly/2ioFfeZ