Curated Conversations: Artist Talk – Sedrick Huckaby

Tuesday, October 5, 2021 | 5:00 p.m. CT

Registration required; free to attend.

Join Blanton Deputy Director Carter Foster and Fort Worth, Texas-based artist Sedrick Huckaby as they discuss Huckaby’s new Contemporary Project exhibition of recent portraits.

Funding provided by the Carolyn Harris Hynson Centennial Endowment.

About our Speakers

Carter E. Foster joined the Blanton in 2016 as Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings. He organized the exhibition Form into Spirit: Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin, to mark the opening of Kelly’s landmark building, and he co-authored the recent monograph on it published by Radius Books. He also organized Expanding Abstraction: Pushing the Boundaries of Painting in the Americas, 1958–1983  and co-organized Drawn: From the Collection of Jack Shear. Prior to the Blanton, he was a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art for eleven years. He has written extensively about modern and contemporary art.

Sedrick Huckaby’s paintings and drawings metaphorically express universal themes of faith, family, community, and heritage – with a pictorial aggression that approaches relief sculpture.  Huckaby focuses on the subjects of quilts and portraits in his quest to glorify everyday people.  Huckaby states, “I believe my paintings are done in a language more closely in tune with my soul than the language of my tongue.”  Huckaby is known for his monumental scale of painting, with his largest painting thus far being his 80 foot long, four-part painting, “A Love Supreme,” painted over a period of eight years, for which Huckaby was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Huckaby is also the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, an honorable mention award winner in the  2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and a 2019 finalist. Additionally, he is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell foundation grant, Elizabeth Greenshield award, and was the Texas State Artist for 2018. After earning a BFA at Boston University in 1997, and an MFA from Yale University in 1999, he participated in the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center residency and traveled the U.S. and Europe studying old master paintings. When he returned to the U.S. Huckaby settled into his home town of Fort Worth, Texas, where he was born in 1975.  Since returning home he has been invited to participate in a number of residencies and fellowships including a Davison Family Fellowship from the Amon Carter Museum of American art, an Elaine De Kooning House residency and an Art for Change residency in New Delhi, India. Huckaby’s work has entered the permanent collections of numerous museums and institutions including the American Embassy in Namibia; Amon Carter Museum of American Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Yale University Art Gallery; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is married to artist Letitia Huckaby and is the father of three children, Rising Sun, Halle Lujah and Rhema Rain Huckaby. He holds the position of Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Arlington. 

Feature Image Credit: Installation view of The Huckabys, 2020, in i, May 29–December 5, 2021, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin