Note: the following is part of Glasstire’s series of short videos, Five-Minute Tours, for which commercial galleries, museums, nonprofits and artist-run spaces across the state of Texas send us video walk-throughs of their current exhibitions. This will continue while the coronavirus situation hinders public access to exhibitions. Let’s get your show in front of an audience.
See other Five-Minute Tours here.
Letitia Huckaby: Beautiful Blackness at Foto Relevance in Houston. Dates: March 6 – May 10, 2020. The run of the show might be extended.
“Letitia Huckaby’s Beautiful Blackness taps deep into the historical entanglements surrounding African American life in the rural American south. Drawn from multiple portfolios of Huckaby’s work, Beautiful Blackness is filled with documentary-style imagery of the South: lush landscapes, domestic interiors and exteriors, and ethereal figurative silhouettes. The photographs are presented in a distinctive material dimension, framed in embroidery hoops, reproduced on patterned flour sacks, and sewn into patchwork quilts.
Together, the works in Beautiful Blackness combine to depict a people and an unfulfilled legacy, yielding a visual elegy for a lost promised land. Rooted in each piece is a concern with the past, punctuated in particular by General William Sherman’s unkept, post-Civil War promise of forty acres and a mule, the migration of Exodusters, and the establishment of Freedmen’s towns throughout the region. The use of heirloom fabrics transforms Huckaby’s works into objects that seem poised to be passed down from one generation to the next.”
