Sedrick Huckaby

Friends, family and neighbors serve as the subjects of Sedrick Huckaby’s art. Drawing people he knows, the Fort Worth-based artist monumentalizes the ordinary person. Huckaby, whose approach to portraiture connects him to artists as diverse as Lucien Freud, Alice Neel, Henry Taylor and Kerry James Marshall, considers the creative act of painting and drawing as a form of thinking.

In his recent solo debut in New York at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in 2017, Huckaby presented lithographs from his The 99% Project series from 2012-2013. Consisting of paintings and drawings, the series aimed at making visible the invisible by representing the voice of a community not traditionally imaged in portraiture. Huckaby has become known for his use of impasto paint to create murals evocative of traditional quilts, as well as working with images of quilts as background components of his portraits. In a similar vein, he considered The 99% Project to be like a quilt, so that these individual voices were heard as one unified community. Many of the sheets also feature transcribed sentences and phrases of the things his subjects said during the sitting. “Huckaby’s art is the result of his desire to give his subjects a face and a voice,” John Yau has observed, and it is this that infuses these portraits with a remarkable immediacy and presence.