Welcome
featuring work by Letitia and Sedrick Huckaby
March 5 thru April 24, 2022
As a collaborative project space, Kinfolk House presents more than simple exhibitions or pairings of artists, it provokes dialogue between artists and creatives. In this first year, it is important that our projects embody Kinfolk House’s core values. Our first project, Welcome, by Letitia and Sedrick Huckaby grounds the space in family, tradition, and legacy by collaborating with Sedrick’s 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 and make them feel at home. Though not an artist herself, she expressed her creativity through textiles, fashion, and music. Assisted by family, the Huckabys have selected a collection of memorabilia and sound recordings to exhibit alongside their own work as part of the collaborative nature of the space.
Sedrick’s paintings of his grandmother form a direct connection to the former homeowner. The paintings span several years, beginning prior to Big Momma’s death and extending to the present day. Through layers of paint, Sedrick reveals the emotional history of the home and the changes in the physical space over time. Depicted in the paintings are people who have lived in and known Big Momma’s house including her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His work is about remembering and memorializing Carpenter’s life and the people who have connections to the space. Alongside Sedrick’s paintings will stand his uniquely textured figurative sculptures crafted from newspaper pulp.
Letitia’s large-scale landscapes investigate places connected to Carpenter’s past. Big Momma moved from her hometown of 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 and displayed in oval hoops, these photographs will also be embroidered with scarlet thread—a clear and direct biblical reference to birthright, bloodlines, and sacrifice. The thread will transcribe Big Momma’s words and in doing so imbue the work with her voice.
In conversation with Big Momma, the Huckabys explore the past and how it shapes the present and future. They point to the everlasting legacy of the matriarch of the family and how her spirit continues to reside in this space and with the people who knew her. Through this collaborative project, we hope to shed light on the history of the home and family and to continue Big Momma’s conviction that all are welcome.
Featured Artists:
Sedrick Huckaby was born in 1975 in Fort Worth, Texas. His formal education in art started at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, where he studied with two excellent painters–Ron Tomlinson and Jack Barnett. He then transferred to Boston University (BFA, 1997), where he received extensive academic training in studio art. For graduate studies, he went to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut (MFA, 1999). There he immersed himself in the notion that “art is about ideas” and expanded his conceptual horizons in art and art history.
With a Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship and an Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship, Sedrick was able to explore France, Italy, and Spain for two years. During this time in Europe, he “came to appreciate the Old Masters” and the difference in the social conditions of art production between the present and the past. After his European residency, Huckaby settled in his hometown where he continues to make art.
Sedrick’s journey in art has included residencies at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts, the Skowhegan School of painting and sculpture in Maine, Brandywine workshop in Philadelphia, and Art For Change in New Deli, India. He has also been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including a Guggenheim award, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and a Lewis Comfort Tiffany Award. In 2018, he was named the Texas State Artist for 2018, and was a finalist in the 2016 and 2019 Outwin Boochever Competition Exhibition administered by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
In 2022 his work was included in the group exhibitions We Are Family at New York Academy of Art, Round 54: Southern Survey Biennial at Project Row Houses in Houston, and Kinship at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. During the summer of 2022, he participated in a Joan Mitchell residency in New Orleans, LA. As a Fullbright Scholar, from February through May 2023, Sedrick will be in Mexico’s Coahuila State to make portraits of the Mascogos community, descendants of Afro-Seminoles who settled in Mexico to escape persecution in the United States. Sedrick is currently represented by Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles, CA and Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas, TX.
Sedrick is married to artist Letitia Huckaby and is the father of three children, Rising Sun, Halle Lujah, and Rhema Rain.
Sedrick Huckaby
Letitia Huckaby holds an MFA in Photography from the University of North Texas (2010), a BFA in Photography from the University of Boston at Lesley (2001), and a BA in Journalism from the University of Oklahoma at Norman (1994). Her work is rooted in faith, family and legacy, and acts as a time capsule for the African-American experience. Letitia investigates the relationship between the past and the present, and whether things have changed or remain the same. History is built into her work, both through process and physical materials. A photographer at heart, each of Letitia’s works starts with an image and pushes the boundaries of photography as it comes to fruition. Using a traditional practice in untraditional ways with the goal of contributing to a new visual language.
Letitia has exhibited at Phillips New York, the Tyler Museum of Art, The Studio School of Harlem, 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. Her work is included in several prestigious collections; the Library of Congress, the McNay Art Museum, the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, and the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She was a featured artist in MAP2020: The Further We Roll, The More We Gain at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and State of the Art 2020 at The Momentary and Crystal Bridges Museum, both opened in the spring of 2020.
In 2022, her work was featured in solo exhibitions, Letitia Huckaby: Koinonia, at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio and Bitter Waters Sweet at Art League Houston. She also received the Texas Artist of the Year Award from Art League Houston. In 2023, her work will be included in the group exhibition Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth.
Letitia is married to artist Sedrick Huckaby and is the mother of three children, Rising Sun, Halle Lujah, and Rhema Rain.
Letitia Huckaby
