Art

Myrna Gates once volunteered at Magic City Art Connection; last week she won award of distinction

THE BIRMINGHAM TIMES — Myrna Gates is a long-time Magic City Art Connection (MCAC) supporter: she’s attended for more than a decade, first as a visitor then a volunteer. This year was her first time as an artist at the event.

Published

7 years ago

May 2, 2019

Oakland Post

By Ameera Steward

Myrna Gates is a long-time Magic City Art Connection (MCAC) supporter: she’s attended for more than a decade, first as a visitor then a volunteer. This year was her first time as an artist at the event.

“I [used] to walk around and talk to these artists, and I would always want to be there, but [some years] I didn’t have enough money for the application fee. Something … [would always] keep me from doing it.”

A couple of years ago she wanted to present her artwork so badly at the MCAC that she chose to volunteer because she had missed the deadline [to enter the festival].

“I just wanted to be a part,” Gates said. “The whole time I was [volunteering], I was … trying to keep myself from crying because I knew I wasn’t supposed to be out there volunteering. I was supposed to be out there as an artist, not just a volunteer.”

“Blue Bayou”

Gates, 53, from Birmingham’s Wenonah community, was at the MCAC last weekend, but not as a visitor or volunteer—she was among the 200-plus juried artists from Alabama and across the U.S. who gathered in Linn Park to display a broad range of art mediums and styles.

Gates said the festival was “awesome from the very first day …I sold several paintings, I got so many commissions, so many people who wanted me to do paintings for their offices, or their living rooms… It was 100 times more than what I expected and that’s all the way around…from the people to the artists that you meet…that was beautiful…meeting other artists from different states and they tell you how they travel, how they just go from show to show.”

On Friday, she won an Award of Distinction. “I knew they’d give awards away but I never thought I would win, it wasn’t even in my mind the whole time…so when that gentleman called my name, I literally took off running…I was yelling and screaming and that reaction also made people like me, they just thought that was so cool…people were just coming up to me the next day and…saying ‘you were so happy.’”

Because it was her first year as a participant, she looked forward to presenting her “Blue Bayou” collection.

“My first set of ‘Blue Bayou’ paintings, a collection of all-blue, more of an ocean scene with waves, [was inspired by a fear] I always had about painting with the color blue. I don’t know why I was always scared of it, so I named the collection ‘Blue Bayou,’ meaning sad, but they turn out so beautiful. It’s my favorite go-to color,” Gates said of the blue-themed paintings she began working on in March.

“I stretch my own canvas, so I buy wood and all the materials and begin the process of what size and how many,” she said.

Gates paints in layers, so she can work on a painting for a week to a couple of months: “[It] all depends on when I feel like it is finished. … [Something just] lets me know when it’s finished.”

“Spreading Happiness”

Gates said it’s important that people “see my art and go, ‘Wow!’ I want to spark a conversation. I want people to talk about it. I want [my paintings] to be so touching that [people] want to buy [them].”

“If they look at [the painting] every day, I want it to bring happiness. That’s why I paint. … Maybe it’s my own little way of spreading happiness.”

Gates has always enjoyed painting, but she got serious about it about 15 years ago, when she helped her son, Eric, with an art project during his time as a student at Birmingham’s George W. Carver High School. Her son also had the opportunity to meet Kerry James Marshall, a Birmingham native who is renowned for “his paintings, installations, and public projects … often drawn from African-American popular culture and … rooted in the geography of his upbringing,” according to art21.org.

“I took my son to the meeting [with Marshall], but I didn’t know I was going to get inspired,” Gates said.

Marshall spoke to young people and their parents at the Birmingham Museum of Art. He explained that when he was young and went to art museums, all the paintings seemed to be for whites, so he chose to incorporate black characters into his artwork. Gates was intrigued by Marshall’s lecture.

“It struck something in me because that’s what I saw when I went to to art museums, too,” she said. “[I] went to art museums all the time, but I never saw black figures.”

She often creates her best pieces when she is angry about an issue, Gates said.

“I do some of my best work when I’m upset and what I paint is about racism or inequality or [things] not being fair,” she said, adding that those sentiments inspired her new series, titled “Not Our Kind.”

“I have been in positions [in which I felt that] ‘I’m not their kind,’ … so I stopped trying to be part of the group,” Gates said. “I became my own self and then I found abstract.”

Her objective is to make people look: “I want you to see something. … I want you to find something,” she said.

“Loud and Proud”

Gates, who is self-taught, said she also wants children to see more black artists.

“When you go to [some] festivals, we’re not there. We’re not represented,” she said. “That was one of the reasons I [said to myself], ‘You have to fight [to be part of the festivals]. You have to do whatever you have to do. I don’t care. You have to be [at the MCAC] this year. … Your voice means something. Say something. If you want to change [the fact that we’re not represented], change it. If you want to do it, do it. You be the one to step up and do it.’

“So, I said, ‘I’m going to be there. I’m going to be loud and proud and just say, Hey I am here. I’m representing Birmingham. I’m representing my black community.’”

Gates didn’t start selling her paintings until her children started encouraging her.

“They were like, ‘Ma, your stuff looks just as good as these other people’s stuff. You need to sell it,’” she said.

Gates did her first art show at Avondale Park in 2015 with 10 paintings—and she sold out: “I’ve been selling ever since,” she said, adding that she is inspired by the people who came before her and she wants to inspire others.

Graffiti

Gates appreciates a broad range of art styles, but graffiti is one of her passions.

“A lot of people don’t want words in their paintings, but they accept the words if it’s graffiti,” she said. “I want to do graffiti like … Jean-Michel Basquiat, [a renowned New York City artist who died at age 27]. I love his graffiti and just listening to his story. [I’m] also very inspired when I listen to others, people who are artists and have a story to tell about how they struggled before they made it big. … Even if I never make it big, big I’m happy.”

This article originally appeared in The Birmingham Times.

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Oakland Museum Presents Landmark Retrospective Celebrating Beloved Bay Area Artist Mildred Howard

“Poetics of Memory” coincides with a year of major recognition for Howard. In 2026, she received the California Arts Council’s 50th Anniversary Award, honoring artists whose work has shaped California’s cultural and civic life, as well as the Museum of the African Diaspora’s Artist Impact Award. In 2025, she was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of her transformative contributions to American cultural life.

Published

1 week ago

June 24, 2026

Oakland Post

Mildred Howard. Photo by Christine Cueto for the Oakland Museum of California, 2025.

Special to The Post

The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) opened “Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory,” the first major museum survey of Bay Area artist Mildred Howard, on June 12.

The exhibition spans five decades of Howard’s influential work, bringing together immersive installations, found-object sculptures, archival materials, and new commissions that explore memory, identity, and power in American life.

Howard was born in San Francisco in 1945 and raised in the East Bay, where she went on to study Afro-Haitian dance, make and sell clothing, and experiment with collage and sculpture.

Her multimedia art practice emerged from these experiences, later becoming associated with West Coast conceptual art, San Francisco funk, and a vibrant community of artists like Oliver Jackson, Betye Saar, and Raymond Saunders. Since the 1970s, she has used found materials and family stories to explore memory—both individual and collective.

At OMCA, visitors enter “Poetics of Memory” through a series of intimate galleries featuring Howard’s early mixed-media pieces and sculptures, along with a large video projection of a number of her public artworks.

Together, they emphasize Howard’s interest in everyday objects as powerful carriers of individual and shared stories. Highlights include collages that remix images of the artist herself; found-object sculptures like The History of the United States with a few Parts Missing (2007) that address omissions in dominant narratives; and public works like “Locks and Keys for Harry Bridges” (2001) that transform urban space into a meditation on access and labor.

This culminates in a richly detailed “studio” environment, where works in progress, archival exhibition flyers, historic photographs of Howard and her community, postcards from fellow artists, and other materials offer insight into her creative process and daily life.

The exhibition then opens into a high-ceilinged, dramatically lit space that brings together Howard’s signature immersive installations. On one end, “Crossings” (1997/2026) – a field of hundreds of ceramic eggs leading to an ornate mirror – suggests cycles of birth, motherhood, and transition, while drawing on the emotional echoes of the Middle Passage. On the other end, “Blackbird in a Red Sky” (a.k.a. “Fall of the Blood House”) (2002) – a red glass shack bordered by a pond – also uses reflection and transparency to draw viewers into the work and prompt consideration of themes of identity and home.

Howard’s newest video installation, “Moving Stills” (2026), repurposes never-before-seen family footage she took as a teenager on a train trip to the American South. Projected onto cascading layers of translucent fabric that stretch across an entire gallery wall, the piece immerses viewers in a layered meditation on memory, migration, and time.

The “Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory” exhibit will be on display through Oct. 11 at the Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., Oakland, CA 94612. Museum hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., with extended hours on Fridays to 9 p.m.

This story is sourced from the Oakland Museum of California press office.

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Oakland Director Boots Dazzles Once Again in ‘I Love Boosters’

Riley’s creative output is influenced by progressive ideals. His work, which includes six albums, the 2018 film “Sorry to Bother You,” and the 2023 comedy series “I’m a Virgo,” always shows that the alienation working-class people feel is inevitable under capitalism, he recently told The Guardian.

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3 weeks ago

June 10, 2026

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Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, and Keke Palmer star in “I Love Boosters” playing now in theaters. Directed by Oakland resident Boots Riley. Image courtesy of Neon.

“I feel lonely,” Keke Palmer’s character Corvette says in the first few minutes “I Love Boosters,” the new comedy adventure film from Oakland-based director Boots Riley.

“I wish I could feel lonely,” Naomi Ackie’s character Sade responds. “Try having kids.”

“I Love Boosters” teems with kaleidoscopic colors, sharp playful social critique, otherworldly plot twists, and fast-paced action, but it’s grounded in its main characters’ simple and relatable motivations: They want to be less isolated, and more free to pursue their own creative endeavors.

They’d like to design clothes and run a fashion boutique, but, unfortunately, they’re mostly busy surviving. Corvette and Sade, along with Mariah, played by Taylour Page, hustle and scheme through their brilliant scrappy organized crime group, the Velvet Gang. The gang regularly boosts clothes in the Bay Area and sells them at discounted prices.

Riley portrays the gang in a positive light in “I Love Boosters,” echoing the sentiment and title of a song he recorded 20 years ago with his hip-hop band, The Coup, where he praises boosters for providing poor communities with nice clothes they can afford: like a Robin Hood of the ’hood. But while morally righteous, materially, the gang is troubled. Corvette is haunted by unpaid bills and fears getting kicked out of the building where she squats, a shuttered fast-food chicken joint.

One thing that separates Riley’s film from most others about criminal gangs is that the Velvet Gang’s members work for a living. Theirs isn’t a greedy fantasy of becoming filthy rich, or for one last hit: Boosting is a job that still doesn’t pay nearly enough.

Visually, the film is a mix of psychedelia, afro-surrealism, noir, and perhaps a comic book.

The villain, Christie Smith, played by Demi Moore, an evil genius billionaire and fashion designer who runs the expensive clothing company the gang boosts from. She repeatedly appears on the news to put a target on the Velvet Gang members’ backs. When the gang ends up connecting with those who Christie directly exploits –workers here in the Bay Area, but also those in sweatshops overseas– the fight against Christie can commence; and uncoincidentally, Corvette starts to feel less lonely.

I don’t want to say much about that fight, but it’s delightful. Sci-Fi elements (which appear connected to Marxist theory) enter into the narrative to tie what’s become a pretty scatterbrained story together. Grounded by Palmer’s acting, “I Love Boosters” is a total joy and a refreshing break from the typical narratives we see these days. It’s totally over-the-top, but it knows it is.

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After 10-Year Wait, Fillmore Heritage Center Reopens in San Francisco

After serving as the economic and cultural hub of the Fillmore’s historically Black community for more than a decade, the center’s closure ended what was called the “Rebirth of the Cool,” referring to the neighborhood’s role during the height of Black Jazz in the United States.

Published

3 weeks ago

June 10, 2026

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Rev. Amos Brown of Third Baptist Church addresses community members at the Fillmore Heritage Center ribbon cutting. Photo by Linda Parker Pennington.

By Linda Parker Pennington, Special to The Post

Last Saturday morning, the cloudy skies cleared just as the highly anticipated ribbon-cutting ceremony began, marking the reopening of the Fillmore Heritage Center at 1330 Fillmore and Eddy.

The complex – which had once included Yoshi’s Jazz Club, the Lush Life Art Gallery, the Koret Heritage Lobby, a 54-seat microcinema, and the Black-owned 1300 On Fillmore restaurant – shuttered in 2015.

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announcing the reopening of the Fillmore Heritage Center. Erika Scott, owner of Honey Art Studio, looks on with pride. Photo by Linda Parker Pennington.

“The Fillmore is the most important neighborhood in San Francisco’s history for centering Black culture, music, business, and community, and has shaped this City and influenced the entire country,” said San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie to the gathering of more than 100 community leaders, business owners, and public officials. “This building reflects the deep roots of the Fillmore. Urban renewal left deep scars that are still felt today. This Center celebrates a strong Black community that continues to shape San Francisco. I am proud to join the community as we reopen the Fillmore Heritage Center.”

Although the previous stakeholders will not be returning to the center, spaces are available for nonprofit organizations and ventures, such as Fillmore native Ericka Johnson’s Honey Art Studio.

“This Center will be an economic engine and a thriving venue that shines a light on the Black-owned businesses in this neighborhood and lifts the entire district,” Lurie continued. “Our City is committed to this community for the long term.”

“We’re excited to collaborate with the City to finally reopen these doors,” said Ken Johnson, a videographer and community leader who’d been lobbying for the reopening of the center. “It’s an opportunity to showcase the entrepreneurship and creative spirit of this ‘Harlem of the West’ and the ‘Rebirth of the Cool,’ grounded in our uniquely gifted Fillmore community.”

This month, through its Office of Economic and Workforce Development, the city will begin renting the building’s noncommercial spaces for pop-up events celebrating local talent, arts, and entertainment primarily centered in the Fillmore.