[Paints a legacy & passes it on] Page: 3 of 4
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4;T
PAINTS
A LEGACY
& PASSES
I by Shilo UrbanSedrick Huckaby is one of Fort Worth's most
accomplished artists. His works hang in America's
finest museums. He's won almost every major art
grant on the planet. He's even George W. Bush's
art teacher.
But his greatest achievement is giving voice
to the overlooked, overworked, and oppressed
through art with a powerful presence and an
unshakable belief in every person's
unconditional worth.
Huckaby is doing things his way and reaping
the rewards of his authentic vision and dedication
to his craft. Instead of playing to the market, he
creates art from his soul, with a focus that revolves
around faith, family, and community. Inspired by his
family's artistic heritage and the African Americannarrative, the father of
three has seized every
opportunity to create a
successful career. Now
he's giving back to the
Fort Worth community
that has given him
so much.
Born in Fort Worth
n 1975, Huckaby's
impressive credentials
include a Guggenheim
Fellowship, a Joan
Mitchell Foundation
Grant, and a Louis
Comfort Tiffany Award
- three of the artof American Art for their permanent collection,
"The 99%" installation drew inspiration from 2011's
Occupy Wall Street movement. It features 101
portraits of Huckaby's neighbors from Highland
Hills, a predominately black community in south
Fort Worth. "We knew that the series was virtually
unprecedented in the field of contemporary
printmaking... as a collective and individual
portrait of a local community that explores
contemporary meanings of identity," explains
Shirley Reece-Hughes, Curator at the Amon Carter
Museum. "Huckaby often incorporated quotes by
each of the sitters, which deepens our connection
to the image and person."
"The 99%" is a true slice-of-life with a
veritable sense of place. With unique poses and
preoccupations, the figures ponder everything
from world peace to vegetable gardens, allergy
season to seven children, prayerful hopes to pork
chops for lunch. They share quiet worries, yearn for
loved ones, and boast with youthful confidence.
Yet shining through them all is the inherent value
that they share as human beings, a palpableworld's most prestigious prizes. After launching his
professional studies at Texas Wesleyan University,
he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Boston
University and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale.
His paintings can be found the country's foremost
museum collections, including the Museum of Fine
Arts Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New
York City, and the National Portrait Gallery in
Washington, D.C. Now working as an art professor
at the University of Texas at Arlington, Huckaby
was named the Texas State Artist in 2018.
Huckaby creates captivating sculptures,
drawings, prints, and installations. But he's
best known for his richly textured oil paintings.
He's a master of impasto, a robust technique
that employs thickly layered paint, sometimes
up to three inches deep. It gives his paintings
an undeniable weight and dimensionality that
complements their complex substance. However,
his profound presence imbues Huckaby's work in
every medium and is particularly evident in a set
of black-and-white lithographs called "The 99% -
Highland Hills."
Recently acquired by the Amon Carter Museumfeeling expressed through Huckaby's detailed
strokes. Together, it's a chorus that sings the story
of the community.
Little details become potent emotional vehicles
in Huckaby's hands, just as ordinary people are
given the acknowledgment they deserve. His
celebrated series "Big Momma's House" captures
vivid memories of his grandmother's home during
the final years of her life. Tiny shoes line up by a
striped couch. Curling photos frame a mirror with
family faces. Crinkled hands rest on an open Bible,
peaceful and still beside the scarlet words of Jesus.
Huckaby spent many hours in this home as a child.
He'd walk over after school, hanging out with his
grandmother until his parents could pick him up.
"She always encouraged not only me, but all of
her kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, in
anything positive that they were doing," he recalls.
Huckaby's other grandmother, Mama Sarah,
inspired his monumental painting "A Love
Supreme." Stretching 80 feet long and 8 feet
high, this opus elevates to new heights a humbledomestic icon: the quilt. "Mama Sarah was the
quilter" in the family, he says.
Quilts embody familial love and
' cozy nights, childhood memories
of grandmother's house. They are
often handed down for generations;
most Texas homes today have an
ancestral quilt stored somewhere
in a closet or a chest. Like many of
us, Huckaby slept under quilts at
grandma's house as a child.
Today, quilts are one of Huckaby's
greatest preoccupations as a
painter, but they started as an
afterthought. "Initially in my work,
they were in the backgrounds of
the pieces, because [Mama Sarah]
gave quilts to all of her children, and
so my parents had some. I would
borrow them and put them in the
painting." Soon Huckaby realized
that his backdrops were artistic
treasures themselves.
"As I learned more about art...
I could see how there were all
kinds of creative cultural and
aesthetic things that were passed
down through those quilts," he
says. Bringing the backdrop to the
forefront, he began painting the
family's quilts as a conversation with
Mama Sarah. "I saw [quilts] as an art
form that she did. I wanted to have
a conversation with her, as an artist
and as a quilter, about the aesthetic
qualities that I recognized in thoseil
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Urban, Shilo. [Paints a legacy & passes it on], text, 2018; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2041730/m1/3/: accessed June 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.