Sedrick Huckaby Americas Son

Sedrick Huckaby's large-scale paintings draw inspiration from his family history and his African-American roots. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Huckaby received his BFA from Boston University in 1997 and his MFA from Yale University in 1999.

Huckaby has taught as a professor at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth and currently is a professor of water media at the University of Texas in Arlington. He has been honored as a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, as a Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellow at the University of Illinois, and as a Brandeis Mortimer Hays Traveling Fellow, which gave him the opportunity to study the works of European masters abroad.

Huckaby’s own work has been included in exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, at the African American Museum in Dallas, at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts in Texas, and at the Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta. His work A Love Supreme, comprising pieces forming an 80-foot long painting of quilts created by his grandmother, celebrates both jazz and quiltmaking as central elements of African-American culture. It serves as a foundation for his Guggenheim Fellowship project: to explore and paint the tradition of quiltmaking around the United States, and to add some of those paintings to A Love Supreme to more fully realize his intention in that installation.

Huckaby's work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the African American Museum in Dallas, and the Kansas African American Museum in Wichita. He is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Imagination Celebration Spirit of the Future Award, among others.

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(Biography provided by Thomas French Fine Art)

Used to refer to a time rather than an aesthetic, Contemporary art generally describes pieces created after 1970 or being made by living artists anywhere in the world. This immediacy means it encompasses art responding to the present moment through diverse subjects, media and themes. Contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, performance, digital art, video and more frequently includes work that is attempting to reshape current ideas about what art can be, from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s use of candy to memorialize a lover he lost to AIDS-related complications to Jenny Holzer’s ongoing “Truisms,” a Conceptual series that sees provocative messages printed on billboards, T-shirts, benches and other public places that exist outside of formal exhibitions and the conventional “white cube” of galleries.

Contemporary art has been pushing the boundaries of creative expression for years. Its disruption of the traditional concepts of art are often aiming to engage viewers in complex questions about identity, society and culture. In the latter part of the 20th century, contemporary movements included Land art, in which artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer create large-scale, site-specific sculptures, installations and other works in soil and bodies of water; Sound art, with artists such as Christian Marclay and Susan Philipsz centering art on sonic experiences; and New Media art, in which mass media and digital culture inform the work of artists such as Nam June Paik and Rafaël Rozendaal.

The first decades of the 21st century have seen the growth of Contemporary African art, the revival of figurative painting, the emergence of street art and the rise of NFTs, unique digital artworks that are powered by blockchain technology.

Major Contemporary artists practicing now include Ai Weiwei, Cecily Brown, David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Kara Walker.

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Bring energy and an array of welcome colors and textures into your space by decorating with figurative fine-art prints and works on paper.

Figurative art stands in contrast to abstract art, which is more expressive than representational. The oldest-known work of figurative art is a figurative painting — specifically, a rock painting of an animal made over 40,000 years ago in Borneo. This remnant of a remote past has long faded, but its depiction of a cattle-like creature in elegant ocher markings endures.

Since then, figurative art has evolved significantly as it continues to represent the world, including a breadth of works on paper, including printmaking. This includes woodcuts, which are a type of relief print with perennial popularity among collectors. The artist carves into a block and applies ink to the raised surface, which is then pressed onto paper. There are also planographic prints, which use metal plates, stones or other flat surfaces as their base. The artist will often draw on the surface with grease crayon and then apply ink to those markings. Lithographs are a common version of planographic prints.

Figurative art printmaking was especially popular during the height of the Pop art movement, and this kind of work can be seen in artist Andy Warhol’s extensive use of photographic silkscreen printing. Everyday objects, logos and scenes were given a unique twist, whether in the style of a comic strip or in the use of neon colors.

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