The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) will stage a major retrospective for Bay Area artist Mildred Howard, opening next June.

Titled “Poetics of Memory,” the exhibition will bring together work from across five decades of Howard’s career and will also debut new work by the octogenarian artist, who was awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. The retrospective will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, and the museum is working on a national tour for it.

Howard’s history with OMCA extends even before the institution’s official founding in 1969, through a merger of an art museum, a history museum, and a natural sciences museum. She remembers visiting the Oakland Museum in her youth when it was still housed in the Camron-Stanford House directly on Lake Merritt.

“I’ve had an ongoing relationship with the local museum for many years,” she told ARTnews in a recent phone interview. “I would go there as a child. I’ve taken students there. I’ve been in exhibitions there,” including “Global Elegies: Art & Ofrendas for the Dead” in 2003 and “30+ East Bay Painters and Artists” in 1996.

She added, “The exhibition being in the stat...