Curated by HSA – Director of Art & Design, Adrienne Elise Tarver

Dates: February 5 – May 25, 2019

The Harlem School of the Arts with curator and Director of Art & Design, Adrienne Elise Tarver, proudly presents, “Interwoven,” an exhibition featuring the work of artists Sedrick and Letitia Huckaby.

This unique exhibition presents married couple, Sedrick and Letitia Huckaby’s work side-by-side highlighting their individual and mutual interests in the ties that bind generations in the black community.Textiles play a large role in these recent bodies of work, as they have in the histories of the black community in America. From the cotton picked in southern plantations to the intricate patchwork quilts made from scraps of old clothes, there’s resilience and resourcefulness that is woven into the threads of black history in the United States.

Letitia presents work from her series “40 Acres…Gumbo Ya Ya,” referencing the unfulfilled promise of land to formerly enslaved individuals in post-civil-war America, and the Cajun phrase meaning everybody is talking at once. She stretches images of rural Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas printed on fabric over embroidery hoops, referencing domestic work and handmaid heirlooms which cultivate sentimental value over generations instead of monetary value as the land would have if the promise were
kept.

Calling attention to two textiles that tell histories and hold sentimental value, Sedrick’s large-scale oil paintings are visceral and personal portraits of individuals in memorial t-shirts whose backgrounds often feature quilts. The t-shirts, a contemporary trend used to immortalize loved ones with fashion sit in contrast to the traditional artisan craft of quilting that allowed the black community to pass histories and images through the generations and which have been popularly elevated in the contemporary art world by artists, Faith Ringgold and the quilters of Gees Bend.

Together, the work of Sedrick and Letitia Huckaby interweaves images of people and places asking us to value the everyday individuals and the forgotten locations that contribute to the larger story of this country.

Artists: Sedrick Huckaby, Letitia Huckaby

Sedrick Huckaby (b. 1975, Fort Worth, Texas). Boston University (BFA, 1997); Yale University (MFA, 1999). Huckaby has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including a Guggenheim award, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and a Lewis Comfort Tiffany Award. Most recently he was named the Texas State Artist for 2018. His works are in the collections of American Embassy in Namibia, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, African American Museum, Dallas, Texas; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; and the Tyler Museum of Art, Tyler, Texas.

SLetitia 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 from the University of North Texas in Denton. She has exhibited at the Dallas Contemporary, the Galveston Arts Center, Renaissance Fine Art in Harlem curated by Deborah Willis, PhD, the McKenna Museum in New Orleans, the Camden Palace Hotel in Cork City, Ireland, and the Texas Biennial at Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum. The work is included in several prestigious collections; the Library of Congress, the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, and the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Letitia is represented by the Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas and the Anzenberger Gallery in Vienna, Austria.