Sedrick Huckaby

What to Do with Difference

Talley Dunn Gallery
November 4 – December 9, 2023

Sedrick Huckaby’s What to Do with Difference focuses upon twenty-two intimate portraits completed in New Delhi, India. Created during Huckaby’s residency with the Art for Change Foundation in 2020, these drawings explore how, in an increasingly fractured world, artists and their art can bridge people and their differences together. Drawn from life, Huckaby captures the lives and thoughts of his international group of subjects through his personal approach and connection with each sitter. The artist subjects of this project came from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Sedrick Huckaby’s paintings, drawings, and sculpture metaphorically express universal themes of faith, family, community, and heritage. 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 Provencetown 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 hometown 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, the Elaine De Kooning House Residency and the 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; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, CT; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; 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.