Be A Maverick. The University of Texas at Arlington
Patchworks of history
Art Adjunct Professor Sedrick Ervin Huckaby spent last summer on an artistic journey. As a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, he traveled the country painting quilts.
Webster’s dictionary defines quilt with four short words: “a padded bed cover.” But Huckaby sees the fabric patchworks as folk art at its finest.
As a child, the vibrant colors and intricate stitching in his grandmother’s quilts fascinated him. As a young artist, he recognized that the quilts were more than beautiful objects; they represented an artistic family history. So, along with the larger-than-life portraits for which he has become well known, he began capturing the artistry in quilts owned by his family in paintings.
Big paintings.
One of his works, “A Love Supreme” is an 80-foot painting of his grandmother’s quilts. The name comes from a classic recording by jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.
“Quilts are like the African-American woman’s jazz,” Huckaby explains. “When the women sat together making quilts, it was like a jam session. The women were improvising and making rhythmic beauty together. “
After painting the quilts owned by his family and friends, the 33-year-old Fort Worth native had an idea. He thought it would be artistically challenging to expand on that body of work by traveling the country to investigate what he calls the “quilt phenomenon” in private collections, institutions and ordinary families.
The Guggenheim Foundation agreed. More than 2,600 artist-scholars applied for a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, and only slightly more than 10 percent received the prestigious grants. As a Guggenheim Fellow, Huckaby joins scores of Nobel, Pulitzer and other prizewinners, including Ansel Adams, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Isamu Noguchi, Linus Pauling, Derek Walcott, Wendy Wasserstein and Eudora Welty.
Dean of Liberal Arts Beth Wright says the Guggenheim Foundation describes its criteria for appointing fellows as “stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment.”
That’s Huckaby. The O.D. Wyatt High School graduate began his formal art studies at Texas Wesleyan University in 1995 and then transferred to Boston University, where he earned his bachelor of fine arts degree in 1997. He went on to earn a master of fine arts from Yale University in 1999. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Kansas African American Museum; and the African American Museum in Dallas, to name a few.
“UT Arlington is fortunate to have an artist of such talent, significance and recognition engaged in our programs in the Department of Art and Art History," Dean Wright said.