Art

Letitia Huckaby, Ms. Angela and the Baby

 Cassilhaus, hidden at the edge of town on a drive that eventually gravels into a wildlife\cattle guard and wildflower garden, and then backs into a forest, is the home of a couple who are such advocates for the art of photography that they have designed their beautifully open house to hold exhibits and lectures, as well as working space for interns and resident photographers.

photo courtesy of Frank Konhaus

I mention this first because the house of Ellen Cassilly (its talented architect) and Frank Konhaus (its enthusiastic organizer) is not only a great opening to the collected work of friends and strangers alike, but also a drawing room of inspiration.

Ellen Cassilly, photo by Frank Konhaus

 

Frank Konhaus, photo by Jerry Siegel

A week ago, brilliance came in leaps and bounds at the talk by artist Letitia Huckaby, who has, among other endeavors, been printing photographed silhouettes on vintage textiles.  

Letitia Huckaby, photo courtesy of Ms. Huckaby

Her work, often framed in embroidery hoops, is storied with the history of her family...their origins in Greenwood, Mississippi, in a little Louisiana town north of Baton Rouge, and now outside of Fort Worth where her husband's people come from and where she lives with her family.  It's also a testament to the lives, current and disappeared, of African-American communities, and the people whose spirits she allows us to find there still.

Letitia Huckaby, American Light

 

Letitia Huckaby, Testifies

Place, for Letitia Huckaby, is as much a character as the faces born anew on her collected old cottons.  Reality shows through in spots where the fabric (like that of life), is worn and thin.  Seeing her work through her eyes reminded me right away of the character that Place becomes in Miss Welty's fiction and memoirs...she who spent a portion of her life photographing the South for the Works Progress Administration in the dire times of the 1930's.

Letitia Huckaby, What the Land Remembers

Brought up in Germany, where her father was a commander of a U.S. base, Letitia's African-American heritage was pretty much taken for granted, and, as she noted a few times, protected.  But once grown and studying in Boston, the still-simmering northern vein of xenophobia was an eye-opening experience for her.  In art school, though she learned the rules of traditional photography, Letitia's work slowly turned toward the places the generations before her inhabited, geographically and culturally.

Letitia Huckaby, Ms. Joycelyn

Instilling that history in her vision, she found materials that not only reflected, but became, the work she leads us to envision.  It is so easy to open to the stories she tells through her camera, through her eyes, and her ancestors' and cultures' eyes; for me, in fact, a lot of the places of her work are ones I've lived in and journeyed through.

San Antonio, first, where the McNay, one of my favorite museums, gave her space and time to build an installation, as part of their larger project, Limitless!  Five Women Shape Contemporary Art, and then to her delight bought her installation to keep; Greenwood, which Jake and I explored intently and stayed several times on our way up and down the Natchez Trace, crossing back and forth the bridge dividing life there; Louisiana, along Route 191 and the towns around it, land we found fraught with the thickness of long and difficult and interconnected history. Tulsa, the echoes of Greenwood where migration brought a whole community to live, and now would be lost, except for Letitia Huckaby's work.

 

Letitia Huckaby, One Week Old/Haskell Place [Tulsa]

But she was here in Chapel Hill now, and luck had it that I came face to face with her.  I'd first met her, a quick moment a few weeks before, at the "Draw or Die" film preview about Minnie Evans, the Wilmington, North Carolina artist who was self-taught and only lately honored. 

But it was at Cassilhaus that Letitia and the stuff of her art sparked my visions:  fabric, needlework, the bones of old houses and the lives they engendered, the stories that are behind and ahead of us...all that taken up by a photographer who chose to use the implements of women's crafts to project her art.  It is no secret that those are also the things that inspire what I do (though, I humbly admit, in far less impressive ways as hers). I was struck by the way she went further with our tools...framing her silhouettes in needlework hoops... imagine!  I stood in rapt attention at all she talked about and showed us that night.

She was, as you can imagine, busy with people's questions afterward, so instead of keeping her standing longer I just introduced myself quickly and asked her to come for lunch another day.  And graciously, she accepted.

A few days later, on my porch, the fan whishing away the heat, we talked for a few hours about her life, her journey into the fascinating art she does now, and her ideas for the future...old handkerchiefs, she's thinking, will be a perfect material for her work.  Like Letitia, I've collected them from family or old-thing shops.  I can't wait to see what she makes of them.  

We talked about the wider culture, too...her son going off to college now ("any school that ends in 'Tech'", she laughs...he's into robotics and engineering), away from the protection she and her husband (a painter whose work has, over the years, crisscrossed with hers in theme and vision), have in their turn afforded their children.  It worries her.  It reminded me of a friend's conversation recently, worried the same way about her grandson when he's older, the dangers of racial ignorance brought to bear on the young.  That, too, echoes through her subjects.

It has left me wondering...is there hope, a way to inspire hope for openness among us?  Does art like Letitia's...like anyone's...have the potential to change our children's lives for the better?  Though she didn't mention it at the time, on her website I found another connection...Miss Huckaby, I read, is co-founder of Kinfolk House, a 100-year-old house for artists of black and Latina heritage in Fort Worth...women who work together to influence a broader, more accepting vision of art.

Detail, Setting a Place at the Table for Peace (rvm)

Looking around at some of my work before she left, she shared  possibilities..."Why not try this on bamboo," she said of one of my fabric hangings.  Easy to do, I told her.  We happen to have a small forest of it in the dips of wood around the corner, and Alexander loves chopping into it for his own arts. Letitia had been surprised, she told me, that so much bamboo grew in these parts...it's not native...how did it end up here?  How does anybody and anything end up anywhere?  There are so many journeys, intended and not.

But back to those handkerchiefs...all the old ones I keep in coat pockets and purses...and stacks of linens in drawers.  I'm not a photographer, but mono-printing on them, or transfering, or sewing on pieces of wood or clay or found metal, and inscribing, somehow, words that tell real stories...

Letitia Huckaby,, Bethlie and Naika

You see what I mean.  Not only her talk, but our lunch was an experience open and opening, humor and sorrow woven through it.  Among women, sharing visions in art across any genre or age or culture is an opening...a woman's eyes seeing, a woman's skills and choices of material and ways of doing, no shadow of the old guard between to interfere.

Speaking of that, it had bothered me that at that Ackland presentation of the Minnie Evans film-to-be, it was Ms. Evans' great-grandson who was asked to join the panel  discussion, while her great-granddaughter, Beverly, sat in the audience.  Ironically, more than once, he had to call on her to remember family stories, family arts, who-was-who.  "She's the one who keeps all that," he laughed.  Someday, I'm going to have to have lunch with Beverly Evans, too.  For the real story.

I hope Letitia Huckaby and I can keep in touch, but meanwhile, her waves of art are pushing my own small efforts to welcome shores.