Letitia Huckaby

And Thy Neighb(our)

Talley Dunn Gallery
September 18 – October 30, 2021

Talley Dunn Gallery is honored to announce And Thy Neighb(our), a solo exhibition of acclaimed mixed-media artist Letitia Huckaby comprised of works made during the Fall 2020 International Artist-in-Residence Program art Artpace in San Antonio, Texas. 

From Artpace:

In her Artpace exhibition And Thy Neighb(our), the artist expands this practice with new media and deepened interests as she here presents her subjects in the vein of Old Master paintings. This centuries-old style typically pictured Western European male subjects in paintings done by the hand of European male artists, a narrow view that Huckaby updates and democratizes. As suggested by the exhibition’s title, derived from a Biblical passage (Luke 10:27), And Thy Neighb(our) conjures and queries essential concepts for our globalist twenty-first century, including community, the collective, home, and identity.

All of the fifteen subjects portrayed by Huckaby identify as refugees or immigrants from countries with majority Black populations. Much of current immigration news centers on persons crossing the U.S./Mexico border. However, in photographing Black subjects, Huckaby presents those whose experiences may not be as visible but are nevertheless shortchanged and abused at every step of the immigration process. These subjects include social workers, students, a model, a seamstress, and business professionals—in essence, individuals who make valuable contributions to society wherever they reside.

Huckaby’s subjects were photographed against vintage, patterned bedsheets. Some of these backgrounds are vibrant and eye-catching, while others are simple and understated. In some of the works, the subjects selected the sheet patterns they most identified with; in others, Huckaby made the background selection herself, inspired by aspects of the subject’s story or led purely by aesthetic considerations. The resulting images were then printed onto cotton fabric, which itself possesses a loaded relationship to the histories of colonialism and slavery in North America.

To learn more about this body of work, click here.

​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. Huckaby has exhibited as an emerging artist at Phillips New York, the Tyler Museum of Art, The Studio School of Harlem, 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, and the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Huckaby was a featured artist in MAP2020: The Further We Roll, The More We Gain at the Amon Carter Museum and State of the Art 2020 at The Momentary and Crystal Bridges Museum, both opened in the spring of 2020. Huckaby was also a Fall 2020 Artist in Residence at ArtPace.