on view: letitia huckaby

Bitter Waters Sweet

LETITIA HUCKABY

Art League Houston 2022 Texas Artist of the Year

On View: September 16 - December 4, 2022 I Main Gallery
Opening Reception: 6-8 PM, Friday, September 16, 2022

A Conversation with Kendyll Gross and Letitia Huckaby
Saturday, October 22, 2022, at 4:00 pm

In-Person Book Signing with Letitia Huckaby
Saturday, December 3, 2 - 3:30 PM

RECENT PRESS

Glasstire - Learn About Art League Houston’s Texas Artist of the Year, Letitia Huckaby

Art League Houston is proud to present, Bitter Waters Sweet, an exhibition of new work by Fort Worth artist, Letitia Huckaby, the 2022 Texas Artist of the Year. In her exhibition as the Art League Houston (ALH), 2022 Texas Artist of the Year, Letitia Huckaby explores the legacy of Africatown, the historic community near Mobile, Alabama, that was founded by a group of West African people who were trafficked to the U.S. as slaves shortly before Emancipation, and long after the Atlantic slave trade was banned.  The ship that brought them, the Clotilda, was scuttled in Mobile Bay shortly after delivering its cargo in 1860 to conceal its illegal activity.  The wreckage was rediscovered in 2018 and is currently the subject of active archaeological research.  

Huckaby’s photographs, printed on cotton fabric, bring together the legacy of Africatown, its founders and their descendants, with the history of the ship Clotilda and its persistent physical proximity to the community.  Through her imagery and materials, her work ties the past to the present as she examines history and its contemporary connection to the black experience.   A catalog published by ALH and designed by Shefon N. Taylor will be available in conjunction with this exhibition. The catalog includes works from the project and a critical essay by Christopher Blay, a writer and Chief Curator at the Houston Museum of African American Culture in Houston, Texas.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Letitia Huckaby’s career as a photographer did not start with a camera, but with ballet slippers. In 1988 and 1989, she was chosen to participate in the prestigious Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, and study Modern dance for two weeks under Fulbright scholar and Guggenheim Fellow Pat Catterson of New York City, at Quartz Mountain. Along with dance, the residency offered classes in writing, orchestral and choral music, acting, painting, drawing, and photography. Students came from all over the state to study in all these various disciplines and it was her first exposure to the power of photography as an art form. She was immediately enamored with the process of capturing and printing an image. Unfortunately, her parents were not as impressed with her career prospects in photography, so at the University of Oklahoma, she studied Journalism with an emphasis on Advertising.

After graduating in 1994 with a BA in Journalism, Huckaby went on to secure a position at a radio station in Lawton, OK as the Promotions Coordinator. Although she thoroughly enjoyed that position, her mind kept wandering back to photography. She enrolled in a Vocational College, intending to make photography her hobby, and immediately fell in love with the medium.

It was around this time that the Oklahoma Arts Institute invited Huckaby back to assist in their Public Relations department, and she found herself wandering around the photography exhibit of instructor Christopher James, an internationally known artist, and photographer. His documentary project in India was a pivotal moment in Huckaby’s career. Specifically, James’ image Dying Man, taken in Benares, India in 1985. This photograph captures an elderly man taking his last breath in a “death hotel.” In the image, you can see the smoke from a single candle entering his nostrils and swirling around his head. It looked to Huckaby as if James captured this gentleman’s spirit exiting his body. She was so moved by this one photograph that she decided to go back to school and get a degree in photography and had the opportunity to study under James who was the Director of Photography at the Art Institute of Boston (now the art school for Lesley University).

While in Boston, Huckaby found her voice in documentary photography: documenting a dance studio that provided free classes to inner-city kids, a historic jazz club called Wally’s that was on the Chitlin’ Circuit (performance venues for black performers during the era of segregation), backstage at the Bobbi Brown cosmetics shows, assisting a photographer at a wedding officiated by Bishop Desmond Tutu and just honing her craft by capturing city life with street photography. She received numerous awards and scholarships, started freelancing and selling her work, and held her first exhibition.

After graduating in 2001 with a BFA in Photography, Huckaby moved back south to be closer to family. She established roots in the Dallas/Fort Worth area where she began freelancing for newspapers and school districts. She shot weddings, sports portraits, and babies. Eventually, she landed a job teaching high school photography, but this came after getting married, the birth of her first child, and the loss of her father. She decided to pursue a master’s degree in Photography at the University of North Texas.

During her studies, influenced by the loss of her father who was from Greenwood, Mississippi she began to push beyond the straight image. She felt a need to layer additional information into the work, and she started by looking at cotton. Greenwood is the fourth-largest producer of cotton, and after her father passed, she noticed that her grandmother’s neighborhood was surrounded by cotton fields on three sides. Her exploration of materials led her to the practice of printing her images onto cotton fabric: sometimes vintage, sometimes heirloom, and sometimes just plain, white cotton fabric. As a Black person in America, cotton symbolizes the history and a connection to ancestry. It symbolizes struggles, hardships, and accomplishments. It links across history and ties the past to the present and has become the foundation of Huckaby’s work. She first began by quilting images together, then making dresses out of family photographs, printing on vintage feed sacks and cotton-picking sacks, framed photographic quilt tops, and finally, progressing to installation artwork.

Huckaby’s thesis exhibition, LA 19 (Daughters of God), was a mixed media documentary project on her family and heritage. For this body of work, she created environmental portraits of her extended family on her mother’s side in the backwoods of Louisiana off Highway 19, just north of Baton Rouge. The images were printed onto fabric, cut into strips, and handsewn into traditionally African American quilting patterns that referenced the quilts of Gee’s Bend. Once the photographic quilt tops were complete, they were displayed in antique frames. The exhibition debuted at the South Dallas Cultural Center, TX (2010) and traveled to the Galveston Arts Center, TX (2010); Dallas Contemporary, TX (2010); and was featured in Photo Nola at the McKenna Museum in New Orleans, LA (2010); Next Wall Gallery in conjunction with FotoFest, Houston, TX (2012), and in a one-person show at the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, AR (2012).

Since obtaining her MFA in Photography (2010) from the University of North Texas, Huckaby has exhibited both nationally and internationally. She has exhibited as an emerging artist at Phillips, New York City (2019); Harlem School of the Arts, NY (2019); Tyler Museum of Art, TX (2018); Texas Biennial at Blue Star Contemporary, Houston, TX (2013); Camden Palace Hotel Community Arts Centre, Cork City, Ireland (2012); Renaissance Fine Art Gallery curated by Deborah Willis, Ph.D. Harlem, NY (2010); and McKenna Museum, New Orleans, LA (2010). More recently, her work has been featured in exhibitions at Bridge Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2021); 108 Contemporary, Tulsa, OK (2021); McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2021); Masur Museum, Monroe, LA (2021); Hillard Museum, Lafayette, LA (2021); LSU Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, LA (2021); and at Foto Relevance in conjunction with FotoFest, Houston, TX (2020). Huckaby’s work is in the permanent collections of several prestigious museums, including the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington DC; Houston Civic Art Collection, Art at Houston Airport Systems, Houston, TX; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Hillard Art Museum, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, LA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX; Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, PA; and the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection at Scripps College in Claremont, CA.

Additionally, Huckaby was a featured artist in MAP2020: The Further We Roll, The More We Gain at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (2020), and State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR (2020). She has participated in numerous national and international residencies including ArtPace in San Antonio, TX Curated by Lauren Cross, Ph.D. (Fall 2020); Tallgrass Artist Residency in Matfield Green, KS (2019); In Situ Artist Residency in Tuscany, Italy (2018) Brandywine Workshop residency in Philadelphia, PA (2010); and Gee’s Bend – Artist Residency Under the tutelage of Lucy Mingo, a Gee’s Bend quilter in Boykin, AL (2007). Most notably, her exhibition Lagniappe: Works by Letitia Huckaby was listed #2 in Glasstire’s top five shows in Texas by critics Christina Rees and Brandon Zech (2019) and #3 for a group exhibition entitled Limitless! Five Women Reshape Contemporary Art with Martine Gutierrez, Yayoi Kusama, Sandy Skoglund, Jennifer Steinkamp at the McNay Museum of Art in San Antonio, TX (2020). She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Hopper Prize (2018), Critical Mass Finalist (2014 & 2013), Directors Choice Award Center for Fine Art Photography selected by Hamidah Glasgow, Executive Director, and Curator at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Denver, CO (2013), Juror’s Choice Award in the American Dream Exhibition by Deborah Willis, Ph.D. at New Orleans Photo Alliance, LA (2010), and was one of 76 artworks to be acquired by the City of Houston (out of 670 submissions) for the Houston Airport's Civic Art Collection to be on view at George Bush Intercontinental and William P. Hobby Airports (2021).

Huckaby’s work has been featured in several prestigious newspapers, magazines, novels, catalogues, and broadcast stations. Including Promise and Peril by Darryl Ratcliff, Dallas Morning News (2020), Human Stories by Rebecca Sherman, PaperCity Magazine (2020), Voices Raised by Aja Martin, Patron Magazine (2020), Double Exposure Modern Luxury Houston Magazine (2020), Full of Love: Letitia Huckaby in Conversation, by Taylor Janay Manigoult, Burnaway (2021), Letitia Huckaby in Conversation with Jonathan Square for the Textile Association of America (2021), and a feature on Art Rocks” a national syndication of Louisiana Public Broadcasting by Senior Producer Dorothy Kendrick (2020). Selected novels and catalogues include Collecting Black Studies: The Art of Material Culture, edited by Lise Ragbir and Cherise Smith (2020), Tales Of Courage In The Heartland: Symphony in the Flint Hills Field Journal, Volume XII (2020), All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack by Harvard Professor Tiya Miles (2021), Athenaeum Review edited by Dr. Benjamin Lima, the University of Texas at Dallas, Issue 5, Winter (2021), and Otherwise/Revival by Cara Megan Lewis and Jasmine McNeal (2021), a catalogue which featured thirty artists, including Trenton Doyle Hancock, Clementine Hunter, Lezley Saar, Genesis Tramaine and Kehinde Wiley.

Working from the perspective of a documentary photographer but outputting the images as unique fabric pieces, Huckaby’s subject matter has remained focused on history, culture, and storytelling. One project, in particular, A Tale of Two Greenwoods, documents two residential blocks in two different cities. One block is in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Haskell Place in a neighborhood adjoining historic Greenwood. Greenwood was one of the most prosperous African American communities in the early 20th century, which was desecrated by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The other residential block is located on St. Charles Street in the town of Greenwood, Mississippi—the namesake of the district in Tulsa and the birthplace of her father. The images are printed onto cotton fabric and framed in embroidery hoops hinged together, like the bifold frames people displayed of loved ones in their homes. The work speaks to the desire for people to build a home of their own, the struggles that hinder the “American Dream” for far too many of its citizens, and a present nostalgia (living in a state that is linked heavily to the past).  This body of work was most recently displayed in Tulsa during the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre at 108 Contemporary. It will be traveling to St. Edward’s University, Austin, TX in the fall of 2022 and will be featured in a 2023 exhibition, Emancipation at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX. 

Huckaby is a co-founder of Kinfolk House, a new creative project space in the predominantly Black and Latina/e/o neighborhood of Polytechnic in Fort Worth, TX.  Founded with her husband, Sedrick Huckaby, Kinfolk House inhabits a 100-year-old historic home owned by Sedrick’s grandmother, Hallie Beatrice Carpenter. The inaugural exhibition opened on March 5, 2022, and features work by both Letitia and Sedrick.  Huckaby lives and works in Fort Worth, TX with her husband Sedrick Huckaby and is the mother of three children, Rising Sun, Halle Lujah, and Rhema Rain. She is represented by Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas, TX.

Artist Website

ADDITIONAL WORKS ON VIEW

Texas
HMAAC
We invite you to visit HMAAC for NEGATIVE WOMEN: FOUR PHOTOGRAPHERS QUESTIONING BOUNDARIES, a group exhibition featuring work by Ciara Elle Bryant, Tanya Habjouqa, Mari Hernandez, and Letitia Huckaby. The exhibition will be on view from November 4, 2022, to January 21, 2023.

Talley Dunn Gallery
Talley Dunn Gallery is pleased to announce One More Once opening on Saturday, November 12th from 5 PM – 7 PM. The exhibition will feature over thirty works of art ranging in media including paintings, works on paper, photography, sculpture, and mixed media works. "One More Once" highlights the diverse roster of artists associated with the gallery and its program, including Anila Agha, Helen Altman, Nida Bangash, David Bates, Natasha Bowdoin, Julie Bozzi, Margarita Cabrera, Gabriel Dawe, Leonardo Drew, Vernon Fisher, Pia Fries, Francesca Fuchs, Ori Gersht, Kana Harada, Jacob Hashimoto, Joseph Havel, Letitia Huckaby, Sedrick Huckaby, Butt Johnson, Vicki Meek, Melissa Miller, Arely Morales, Cynthia Mulcahy, Sam Reveles, Linda Ridgway, Matthew Sontheimer, Erick Swenson, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Sarah Williams, and Xiaoze Xie.

National
Akron Art Museum
We invite you to visit the Akron Art Museum for State of the Art: Constructs, a group exhibition featuring work by Sadie Barnette, Alfred Conteh, Maya Freelon, Hugh Hayden, Letitia Huckaby, Jeffrey Meris, and Sable Elyse Smith. The exhibition will be on view from November 12, 2022, to February 6, 2023.

Newport Art Museum
We invite you to visit the Newport Art Museum for Social Fabric: Textiles and Contemporary Issues, a group exhibition featuring work by: AIDS Quilt RI, Jim Arendt, Judy Chicago and International Honor Quilt artists, Elizabeth Duffy, Brooke Erin Goldstein, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Letitia Huckaby, Tamara Kostianovsky, Jesse Krimes, Dinh Q. Lê, Aubrey Longley-Cook, Veronica Mays, the National AIDS Memorial, L. J. Roberts, Alison Saar, Marie Watt, Emma Welty, and Nafis M. White. The exhibition will be on view from December 3, 2022, to June 11, 2023.

International
Rencontres de Bamako - Mali Biennial
The Mali biennial is dedicated to African photography and video taking place between October 20, 2022, and December 20, 2022.