Some artists want their works to appear behind the velvet ropes of a museum where guards keep an eye on visitors’ every move. Mildred Howard wants her work to be in places where everybody can see it. Her largest public art piece, Frame (2015), a 22-by-20-foot rococo bronze structure, is situated in San Francisco’s Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. The empty rectangle draws the eye to Refrain (2015), a cluster of vertical steel rods created by Walter Hood that stand as if in conversation with Howard’s work. Breathtaking views of Hunters Point, other parts of the city, Treasure Island, the East Bay, and even the South Bay lie both within and beyond Frame, depending on one’s vantage point. The piece highlights the shipyard’s central role in “migrations from the southern part of the United States,” Howard wrote in a catalog for the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma. “People came out to the West Coast to find employment.… A lot of them worked in that shipyard. I wanted to frame those who walk through the frame. You are the art. You are part of what makes this place what it is.”
During an
