Letitia Huckaby Responds to Abraham Lincoln’s Promise

Letitia Huckaby is trending on HENI News as the artist helps commemorate the anniverary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

Huckaby’s HENI Score—a unique artist sentiment index—soared by 184% recently when her work was included in “Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation” at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, alongside pieces by six other Black artists.

The artists “has mined her own family’s lore for her myriad ‘Emancipation' pieces," the New York Times wrote in a review of the ground-breaking show.

To find out more about Letitia Huckaby and gain a greater insight into her work, see her HENI Dashboard, a special feature of HENI News.

The Fort Worth-based artist’s market is untested at auction so far. She is represented by Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas. In the past she has exhibited at Liliane Bloch gallery, Dallas, and Foto Relevance, Houston.

Born in Fort Worth in 1972, Huckaby studied journalism before concentrating on photography as an artist. She was introduced to art at an early age by her mother, a quilter. The artist’s fascination with textiles and their significance in African American culture is a central part of her work. She is best known for creating multi-layered compositions, sometimes as installations, featuring photographic portraits, rural or urban landscapes, printed on fabric.

In 2022, she was named Texas Artist of the Year, and showed recent work in “Bitter Waters Sweet” at Art League Houston. Her solo exhibition “This Same Dusty Road” was organised by the Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, in 2021. Huckaby's work was also included in “State of the Art” at The Momentary and Crystal Bridges Museum in 2020.

Huckaby told Burnaway magazine: “I always start by taking pictures and consider myself a photographer first and foremost. Later, I start playing with those images and printing them on fabric and deciding if they’re going to be a quilt or a dress or whatever, a sack or things like that.”

Huckaby is also the co-founder of the Fort Worth community gallery and performance space Kinfolk House with her husband, the painter Sedrick Huckaby. Their biggest artistic undertaking yet, she had doubts initially about the cost of restoring what had been his late grandmother’s home. “I didn’t initially want to buy the house, but Sedrick could see the vision of it,” she told Dallas Magazine.