Visiting Artist: Sedrick Huckaby (CFA'97)

Sedrick Huckaby (CFA 97) is a Texas-based painter known for large-scale portraits rendered in thick impasto. His densely built-up paintings portray the artist’s friends, neighbors, and family on a monumental scale, elevating them to the status of Renaissance icons. His paintings have an undeniable materiality that nonetheless coaxes an almost ethereal luminosity out of his subjects. Quilts are an important feature in his work: serving as backdrops for portraits or as the subject of large-scale still-lifes, they act as meditations on history, artistic and familial legacies, and the creative act as a labor of love. With a deep commitment to telling the personal stories of his subjects, for Huckaby portraiture is intrinsically linked to building community and practicing empathy. Huckaby’s work is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where it was recently featured in the exhibition Monuments to Us. Other venues for his work include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago, among others. Huckaby received his BFA from Boston University in 1997, and his MFA from Yale University in 1999. He is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Part of the Contemporary Perspectives Lecture Series at Boston University School of Visual Arts.