Letitia Huckaby

An Invitation to Madison County

Talley Dunn Gallery
On View Through November 28, 2026

Artist Talk and Exhibition Walkthrough
Saturday, November 7, 4pm

The History and Making of An Invitation to Madison County
Panel Discussion with Letitia Huckaby, Johnica Rivers, and Nancy Garnett Williams
Saturday, December 5, 4pm

Talley Dunn Gallery is pleased to present renowned photographer and multimedia artist Letitia Huckaby and her exhibition An Invitation to Madison County on view October 10 through December 19, 2026. This exhibition features new work drawn from the artist’s Madison Project, a series of thirty-two woven textiles exploring the landscape, family, and history of Madison County, Virginia. Beginning with intensive research in early 2025 and numerous site visits, the artist delved into the rich and powerful history of Madison County and the surrounding area. Huckaby explored the fertile and lush landscape, historic buildings, and the elders of the community. 

Central to the region is the former plantation, Montpelier. Built in 1764, Montpelier was the childhood home of James Madison as well as the place to which he returned after serving two terms as the 4th President of the United States in 1817.  More than 300 enslaved individuals and six generations of families were connected to the Virginia plantation through slavery. 

Throughout the series, Huckaby moves among people and places, bringing portraits into dialogue with landscapes and historic structures that bear the traces of generations. Her attention extends beyond Montpelier itself, examining how plantation histories remain present within the surrounding landscape and in the lives of descendants connected to them.

From hardwood forests to gravel roads and sacred ground, Huckaby explores the history of these places and their undeniable connections to the present. The scenes of nature transition to evocative imagery of historical structures, churches, homesteads, and gathering places presented on woven tapestries.

At the center of the project are elders from Madison County, many in their eighties and nineties and descendants of people enslaved at plantations throughout the region. Huckaby engages with individuals whose lives and experiences reflect different dimensions of the community—a seamstress, a historian, a musician, a pastor, and a groundsman—alongside the places where their stories have unfolded. At first glance, a middle school, an old store, a church, and a juke joint may appear as architectural subjects, but on closer examination they emerge as sites that have sustained community life and historical memory for centuries.

The works are rendered as woven textiles, extending Huckaby’s longstanding engagement with photography and materiality. By translating photographic images into cloth, Huckaby brings the tactile qualities of textiles to bear on the people, architecture, and landscapes she documents. The material becomes integral to how viewers encounter Huckaby’s photographs, emphasizing domesticity and family through their presence as objects and images.

Letitia Huckaby (b. 1972, Augsburg, Germany) uses photography as a tool to explore Black American heritage, cultural traditions, and faith. Her research-based practice combines prints and fabrics, reexamining history and its contemporary connection to the Black experience.

Huckaby has a degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma, a BFA in photography from the Art Institute of Boston, and she holds an MFA from the University of North Texas in Denton. Her work has been exhibited at, among others, Art League Houston; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth; the Tyler Museum of Art, Tyler; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; the Studio School of Harlem; and the Texas Biennial at Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio. Collections holding her work include the Library of Congress; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont; and the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection at Scripps College, Claremont, California. Huckaby was named the 2022 Texas Artist of the Year by Art League Houston. Huckaby is the co-founder of Kinfolk House, a collaborative project space in Fort Worth. She lives and works in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.