We saw the exhibit of Mildred Howard’s work at the Oakland Museum of California last week. Called “Poetics of Memory,” it was a wonderful collection of the work of a Bay Area artist — now 80 — who has done everything from making large outdoor installations to creating pictures using copies made on a color Xerox machine as a starting point.
The exhibit even included an elaborate sort of slide show of snapshots she took as a young teenager on a family trip from the Bay Area to Galveston, and some of her work was built on the knowledge she gained from her parents work selling antiques, so it not only incorporated most of the decades of her life thus far, but also her history.
Some pieces directly address racism – three mummified statues of men who were noted in American history (including Francis Scott Key) and also known enslavers made a strong statement. Other pieces implied it, while still others invoked other parts of her life.
She’s well-known in the Bay Area and has shown in galleries and exhibitions around the world, and her work is both highly creative and thought-provoking. Howard has spent her life as an artist and given the world an impressive body of creative work.
It got me to thinking of how wonderful it is to spend one’s life creating art and to have a body of powerful work to show for it. To me that’s so much better than getting rich.
I’m pretty sure Mildred Howard isn’t rich, because the exhibit referenced the problem she’d had when the rent was raised on the Berkeley studio she’d both worked and lived in for 17 years and she had to find another place — not an easy thing to do when a lot of your work is large.
(I must say I don’t understand a landlord who would drive out a tenant doing great work just to make a few more bucks, but then I don’t understand the money-driven mentality at all. I understand wanting to have enough so that you have a place to live and enough to eat and so forth, but not the getting rich at the expense of others part.)
Some people do get rich from making art, but most don’t. And the ones who get the richest aren’t necessarily the best artists, while history abounds with stories about great artists who died broke.
Here’s the thing about being a writer or an artist or a musician or an actor or a dancer or any number of other creative pursuits: there’s not a job sitting out there waiting for you to get the right degree and training so you can fit right in.
You have to find your own path, and you mostly have to have a day job, at least in the beginning. Mildred Howard worked as an artist’s model, just as an example. Lots of artists teach art, either in school systems or through more informal classes. And they go after grants and commissions, as Howard has done.
Having a day job means you have to work at your art around the edges, which usually means you sacrifice sleep or social activities or perhaps having a typical family life. Julie Phillips wrote a great book on women artists with children called The Baby on the Fire Escape, which discusses the complexity of having a family and a career you’re passionate about.
I mean, even artists don’t want to be making art all the time and people need other people and a lot of people want to do things and have kids and balancing all of that is tricky, not to mention the problem of putting food on the table.
Still, the point is, if you want to get rich, it’s probably better to go into finance than to consider being an artist.
Less interesting, though, if you ask me.
Of course, a lot of people don’t understand why it takes time and effort to make art. It’s not just that some ideas are wildly complex and require equipment; it’s also that doing exactly what you want to do with the idea can take a great deal of time, even if you’re working in a simple medium like drawing with pencil.
As Ted Chiang observes, in one of his essays on why LLMs can’t make art, writing (and other kinds of creative pursuits) consists of making thousands of choices, even for a short story or a poem. And that doesn’t take into consideration the years of experience you may need to have before you can find the right words or lines or colors for that particular idea.
I have heard so many writers say they couldn’t have done a particular work twenty years ago because they didn’t know enough. Maybe they didn’t know enough about writing, or maybe they didn’t know enough about what the underlying idea really meant, but it took time and doing other work to get to the point where they could do it.
Some writers and artists are so talented that they’re marked as geniuses when they’re young, but I’m pretty sure that even they usually get better with time. The rest of us certainly do.
That’s why it’s good to see an exhibit of someone’s work over time. Sometimes you can see how a small piece made early on later ballooned into something major.
If you’re in the Bay Area, I suggest dropping by the Oakland Museum to see Mildred Howard’s work. If you’re elsewhere, you might check and see if your local museums have retrospective exhibits that span an artist’s lifetime. It’s a good way to see what a creative life can mean.