TYLER, TX.- The Tyler Museum of Art is presenting a selection of oil paintings by the acclaimed Sedrick Huckaby, a contemporary Texas artist who uses thick, impasto paint to create shape-shifting quilt murals, evocative of tradition, family, and faith. The exhibition, A Legacy of Love and Freedom: Quilt Paintings by Sedrick Huckaby, includes a selection of the artist’s most recent works, on view through July 3, 2011 in the Museum’s Bell Gallery. Simply stated, Huckaby paints his grandmother’s handmade quilts, but upon the large canvases, the folding images are a soothing complexity of form and meaning.

"Sedrick Huckaby is one of the nation’s most promising young artists. This is an invaluable opportunity for people to listen as he discusses his works and to learn firsthand what inspires and motivates an artist who is quickly achieving widespread acclaim,” said TMA Curator, Ken Tomio. There is no admission charge for the lecture.

Sedrick Huckaby was born in 1975 in Fort Worth, Texas. He graduated from O.D. Wyatt High School and went on to pursue his formal education in art at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth. Huckaby transferred to Boston University, we he earned his BFA and then on Yale University’s School of Art where he earned his MFA. After graduating, Huckaby studied art in western Europe for two years before returning to Fort Worth. Today, he lives next door to his childhood home (where his parents still live) with his wife and fellow artist Carita Letitia Huckaby. Beyond formal study, it is family and faith that guides Huckaby’s artistic vision, imparting a universal and yet extremely personal tone expressed in many portraits of his family members, especially his grandmother who recently passed away.

Sedrick Huckaby began painting quilts as backdrops for portraits. Over time, he began to focus on the quilts alone as artful messengers, telling stories of family, ancestral legacy and also of spiritual concepts through draping folds and connected patches. His most recent works are typified by heavy layers of paint, an interplay of light and shadow, and a sense of soft texture that defies the hardness of the thick oil on canvas.

A Love Supreme is one of the artist’s largest works, totaling 80 feet in length. Heavy, dense paint expresses the fold, texture and weight of his grandmother’s quilts. Divided into four sections that are categorized by season (Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer), A Love Supreme is a tour de force in painterly sophistication but also approachable by any viewer. Using painting rather than words or phrases, Huckaby communicates things about human experience including spiritual urges, familial connection, and ancestral heritage in a manner that is both reverential and uncomplicated.