Tom Huck

Anatomy of a Crack Shack

2004

Tom Huck, also spelled Hück, is an American printmaker best known for his large-scale satirical woodcuts. He lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, where he runs his own press, Evil Prints. He is a regular contributor to BLAB of Fantagraphics Books. His work is influenced by Albrecht Dürer, José Guadalupe Posada, R. Crumb and Honoré Daumier. Huck’s illustrations have appeared in publications such as The Village Voice, The Riverfront Times and the Minneapolis City Pages. Huck's woodcut prints are included in numerous public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of Congress, Spencer Museum of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Fogg Art Museum, Michael C. Carlos Museum and New York Public Library. He has been represented by David Krut Art Projects in New York, Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, Duane Reed Gallery in St. Louis, Missouri, Gallery Victor Armendariz, Chicago and Eli Ridgway Gallery in San Francisco. Beginning in October 2017, Huck’s gallery representation is C. G. Boerner in New York. In September 2011, he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Huck is best known for creating large-scale woodcuts acting as both satirical narratives and social criticism. He says in his artist statement: "My work deals with personal observations about the experiences of living in a small town in southeast Missouri. The often Strange and Humorous occurrences, places and people in these towns offer a never-ending source of inspiration for my prints. I call this work 'rural satire.'" In December 1999, his work represented the United States in an exhibition entitled “From Kandinsky To Corneille: Linoleum in the Art of the 20th Century,” held at the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen, Holland. Featured in the exhibition was a large scale linoleum cut by Huck entitled Attack of the 50ft. Yard Ornament. The Whitney Museum of American Art in September 2003 featured two works by him in an exhibition entitled “To Be Human.” Both the works featured were woodcuts from the series 2 Weeks in August. An exhibition entitled “Tom Huck and the Rebellious Tradition of Printmaking” opened on August 28, 2009 at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Prints by Albrecht Dürer, William Hogarth, José Guadalupe Posada and Max Beckmann were featured alongside Huck's. An exhibition entitled "Tom Huck: Hopeless Americana" opened on October 17, 2015 at Gallery 210 at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Accompanying this 20 year retrospective was a catalogue that included essays by Richard Field, emeritus curator at the Yale University Gallery of Art. The exhibition included most of Huck's major works in print from 1995 to 2015, as well as sketchbooks and a small selection of studio ephemera.