Introduction
Patty Chang
Jess T. Dugan
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Nan Goldin
Debbie Grossman
Letitia Huckaby
Deana Lawson
Laura Letinsky
Sally Mann
Arlene Mejorado
Catherine Opie
Laurie Simmons
Carrie Mae Weems

Letitia Huckaby (b. Augsburg, Germany, 1972)

Letitia Huckaby studied journalism as an undergraduate in her home state of Oklahoma, later earning a BFA in photography. During the early 2000s, she relocated to North Texas, where she earned her MFA and worked as a photographer and freelance journalist; she also married and started a family with painter Sedrick Huckaby. In addition to their careers as artists, the Huckabys cofounded Kinfolk House in 2022, a collaborative project space in Fort Worth.

While elements of Huckaby’s work trace back to her roots in journalism and documentary photography, her more recent projects have moved into multimedia imagery, often combining photographic processes with textiles to create poetic portraits with family and African American history as their focal points. Her work in Diaries of Home developed from her participation in Texas Christian University’s Portrait Project, an initiative that honors heretofore unrecognized Black individuals who made a significant impact on the University.

For the TCU project, Huckaby focused on Charley and Kate Thorp, a formerly enslaved couple who took on crucial roles when the University was in its formative years in the 1870s. Charley Thorp was a firefighter, security guard, and landscaper, while Kate Thorp became the university’s laundress and midwife, among other things; contemporaries described them as doing everything but teaching. Little was known about the Thorps before TCU established its Race and Reconciliation Initiative in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, seeking to understand the school’s relationship to slavery, the Confederacy, and racism.

Huckaby’s work in Diaries of Home focuses on portraiture of the Thorps’ descendants, in a new series entitled A Living Requiem, 2024. Each descendant is depicted in oval or circular silhouetted portraits, overlaid with vintage floral fabric patterns. At the Modern, the portraits are installed on an antique bird-and-floral-patterned wallpaper that the artist found at the Hayes Plantation in North Carolina; Huckaby scanned the textile to use as a backdrop for the regal silhouettes. In doing so, the artist takes ownership of the plantation pattern, reclaiming and repurposing it in recognition of enslaved people and their descendants.

The portraits are presented in intricate wood frames that relate to another form of family memorial. In the 1800s, mourning brooches were treasured family items, often incorporating locks of hair from departed loved ones. In the present day, the hair can be used for DNA samples, providing an important and often missing piece of ancestry for many descendants. Huckaby inherited brooches of this kind from her grandparents, who lived at a similar time to the Thorps. The frames, made of simple birch wood, are taken from historical brooch patterns. The router cuts and multiple glued layers of the frames become intricate designs, rich in color and texture—elevated in a way that Huckaby describes as similar to making a quilt from fabric scraps. 

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