Talley Dunn Gallery is honored to announce that Letitia Huckaby will be awarded Art League Houston’s 2022 Texas Artist of the Year. As one of Texas’ most celebrated and acclaimed mixed media artists, Huckaby will receive this distinct honor when the Art League Houston presents the award alongside a solo exhibition celebrating the work of Letitia Huckaby from September 16 to December 3, 2022 and will collaborate with the artist to publish a limited-edition artist catalog.
Trained as a photographer, Letitia Huckaby most often creates thought-provoking multimedia works that evoke a sense of history and place. Whether carefully printed on flour sacks or tenderly held within embroidery hoops, Huckaby’s vividly resonant images of mundane scenes and everyday people are deeply involved in the histories and legacies of Black representation. Huckaby’s works that combine textiles and photography evoke longstanding and deeply personal African American folk art traditions such as quilting—in these works, the past touches the present. Challenging the traditional applications of the various media she adopts, the artist’s hand is always present in her use of the photographic image, stitched and sewn to weave topics of family, identity, faith, and community into the fibers of her thoughtful creations.
I love pushing the boundaries of photography, by using a traditional practice in an untraditional way and hopefully creating a new visual language.
Letitia Huckaby
Letitia Huckaby’s practice considers varied intergenerational Black experiences in the United States with nuance and compassion, sometimes giving rise to ambivalence but not without centering space for expressions of affection and love. Huckaby has created multiple bodies of work around her family history and is also keenly interested in representing members of her communities. She shares, “. . . with my work, I’m showing the value in every soul, in every individual—the beauty of them—and hopefully elevating them through fine art.”
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 from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. Huckaby is recipient of the 2022 Texas Artist of the Year Award from the Art League of Houson. Huckaby has exhibited at the Tyler Museum of Art, The Studio School of Harlem, the Camden Palace Hotel in Cork City, Ireland, and the Texas Biennial at Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum. Her work is included in several prestigious collections; the Library of Congress, the McNay Art Museum, the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, and the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Huckaby was a featured artist in MAP2020: The Further We Roll, The More We Gain at the Amon Carter Museum and State of the Art 2020 at The Momentary and Crystal Bridges Museum, both opened in the spring of 2020. Huckaby was also a Fall 2020 Artist in Residence at ArtPace.