Letitia Huckaby's Welcome in the Rotary Gallery
The Museum of East Texas is pleased to display Letitia Huckaby's Welcome in our Rotary Gallery through April 16. This exhibition is on loan from Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas and we are delighted to share it with our visitors. Special thanks to Denise Davis for curating this exhibit for the Museum of East Texas.
Who is Letitia Huckaby?
Letitia Huckaby has a degree in Journalism from the University of Oklahoma, a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston in photography, and her Master’s degree in Fine Arts with an emphasis in Photography from the University of North Texas in Denton. Huckaby has exhibited as an emerging artist in State of the Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Phillips New York; the Tyler Museum of Art; The Studio School of Harlem; Renaissance Fine Art in Harlem curated by Deborah Willis, PhD; The McNay Museum of Art in San Antonio; the Camden Palace Hotel in Cork City, Ireland; and the Musée National Du Mali. Her work is included in several prestigious collections, including: the Library of Congress, the McNay Art Museum, the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Maison Africaine de la Photographie in Bamako, Mali, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection at Scripps College in Claremont, California.
Huckaby was a featured artist in the travelling exhibition Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation which premiered at the Amon Carter Museum and has since travelled to the Newcomb Museum of Art in New Orleans. Ms. Huckaby was a Fall 2020 Art Pace Artist in Residence and is represented by the Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas. Ms. Huckaby is the Co-Founder of Kinfolk House, a collaborative project space that inhabits a 100-year-old historic home, where community and art converge in the predominantly Black and Latina/e/o neighborhood of Polytechnic in Fort Worth, Texas, she was named the Texas Artist of the Year for 2022 and is currently part of a major traveling exhibition entitled Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation. Her exhibition, A Living Requiem is on view now at the Modern Forth Worth as a part of the Diaries of Home exhibition.
What inspired Welcome?
“Welcome grounds the space in family, tradition, and legacy through the inspiration and presence of Sedrick Huckaby’s (Letitia’s husband) grandmother, Hallie Beatrice Carpenter, whose maiden name was Welcome.
Carpenter, known as Big Momma, was the matriarch of the family and left a lasting legacy. She had the unique ability to bring people together from the neighborhood and beyond, always making them feel at home. Though not an artist herself, she expressed her creativity through textiles, fashion, and music.
In conversation with Big Momma, the Huckabys explore the past and how it shapes the present as well as the future. The artists point to the everlasting legacy of the matriarch of their family and how her spirit continues to reside in her home and with the many people who knew her. Through this connection to family and community, the Huckabys hope to illuminate the ways in which Big Momma’s conviction that all are welcome remains true.
Letitia Huckaby’s large-scale landscapes investigate places connected to Carpenter’s past. Big Momma moved from her hometown Weimer, Texas to Fort Worth with her family sometime between the 1930 and 1940 census, but her children and grandchildren never returned to the places she was from.
Letitia takes a journey, documenting spaces from Weimer to Waco along Highway 77 and then from Waco to Fort Worth along interstate 35 and brings that ancestral memory back to Big Momma’s home. Printed on fabric, some of these images are displayed in oval hoops while others are backed by found quilts. These photographs are also embroidered with thread—a biblical reference to birthright, bloodlines, and sacrifice. The threaded text explores the word ‘welcome’ in its various forms.’”
Comments