Introduction
Sedrick Ervin Huckaby (1975) is an American artist who is known for his use of thick, impasto paint to create murals that evoke traditional quilts and to produce large portraits that represent his personal history through images of family members and neighbors. Huckaby has worked with images from quilts for many years, moving them from background components of portraits into the subject of his work. He was interviewed about his quilt-influenced abstract work in a podcast for Painters Table. His work in on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine arts in Boston, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.
Awards and Distinctions
In 2004, Huckaby was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, which is given to acknowledge “painters and sculptors creating work of exceptional quality through unrestricted career support”. In 2008 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2016, he was one of the winners of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which is hosted by The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In 2017 he received the 2016 Moss/Chumley North Texas Artist Award, which is given annually by the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Biography
Huckaby is a native of Fort Worth, Texas. He studied art at Texas Wesleyan University before receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Boston University in 1997 and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1999. He has lectured on the Grant Hill Collection of African American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, and through the The Artist's Eye series at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. He is currently an assistant professor of painting in the Department of Art and Art History at UT Arlington, where he has been teaching since 2009. He is married to artist Letitia Huckaby.