Letitia Huckaby

Bitter Waters Sweet 

Talley Dunn Gallery
May 6 – July 29, 2023

Bitter Waters Sweet explores the legacy of Africatown, the historic community near Mobile, Alabama. The town was founded by a group of West African people who were enslaved and trafficked to the U.S. shortly before Emancipation, and long after the Atlantic slave trade was banned. The ship that brought them, the Clotilda, was scuttled in Mobile Bay soon after delivering its cargo in 1860 to conceal its illegal activity.  The wreckage was rediscovered in 2018 and is currently the subject of active archaeological research.

Huckaby’s photographs, printed on cotton fabric, bring together the legacy of Africatown, its founders, and their descendants with the history of the ship Clotilda and its persistent physical proximity to the community. Through her imagery and materials, her work ties the past to the present as she examines history and its contemporary connection to the Black experience.

​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.

Her work is featured in the 2023 exhibition Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation, organized by Amon Carter Museum of American Art and Williams College. On view during the 160th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Emancipation visualizes what freedom looks like for Black Americans today and the legacy of the Civil War in 2023 and beyond. Most recently, Letitia Huckaby was awarded 2022 Texas Artist of the Year with an exhibition of her recent work Bitter Waters Sweet at Art League Houston, along with a publication. This critical body of work explores the legacy of Africatown, the historic community near Mobile, Alabama, its West-African founders, and their descendants, along with the history of the ship that trafficked them to the States in 1860, the Clotilda. In 2020, Huckaby was a Fall 2020 Artist in Residence at ArtPace, where her she debuted And Thy Neighb(our), a series that portrays Black refugees and immigrants from across the diaspora in the vein of Old Master paintings.

Letitia Huckaby has exhibited 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 such as 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, which opened in the spring of 2020.