The Brooklyn Rail

In 2010, husband and wife artistic duo Sedrick and Letitia Huckaby purchased Sedrick’s grandmother’s home. A decade and a half later, it has come to be known as Kinfolk House, a site of remembrance and generative creation, a place with a personal and community history.

The house, situated in the predominately Black and Latina/e/o neighborhood of Polytechnic Heights in Fort Worth, Texas, had belonged to Hallie Beatrice Carpenter (known to her family and friends as Big Momma) and her husband Marcos, since 1984. Hallie died on June 5, 2008, about a decade after Marcos, and for two years the house remained under the ownership of other family members. During that time, it began to fall into disrepair and the Huckabys stepped in to save the house, which had been significant to countless people. As Sedrick explains, Big Momma, whose maiden name was Welcome, “had the most amazing ability to create an environment that everyone, no matter how different they were, felt welcomed to and at home.” Her house was a gathering place for immediate and extended family, as well as friends and acquaintances.

As a child, Sedrick lived at the house and recalls walking home from the neighborhood elementary school, hopping the back fence to the acre of land that the house sits on, and walking through a forest of trees and the organized chaos of his grandfather, who was a junk collector and dealer of sorts. Sedrick spent holidays and school breaks at his grandparents’ home and later, as a high school student eager to graduate early, he spent summers there and attended summer school at the nearby high school, to accumulate extra credits. Sedrick spent his first two years of undergraduate college at the nearby Texas Wesleyan University and often dropped in to visit his grandparents. Some of his first paintings were completed in the house from 1993 to 1995 and throughout his career, the home has been one of the places where he has painted regularly. Over the years, he watched the house, and the people in it, shift and change. In 2006, he embarked on a series of paintings called “Big Momma’s House,” documenting people in the home. He didn’t know it at the time, but he was recording the last years of Big Momma’s life.

Sedrick talks about Big Momma as a creative spirit, though she was not a traditional artist: her creativity came out in her fashion sense, culinary expertise, and singing abilities, but perhaps most interestingly, in the way that she forged unlikely friendships and bridged interpersonal friction. So, when he and Letitia decided to purchase the family home, they knew early on that the space needed to embody both the hospitality and creativity of its previous owner. Kinfolk House would be a creative catalyst, a collaborative project space that invites artists to engage with the community and interrogate, explore, and expand the idea of what art can be. Along with building on Big Momma’s legacy, the space was also informed by earlier Black artists like Dr. Eddie McAnthony, who studied with Dr. John Biggers at Texas Southern University and established McAnthony’s Multicultural Studio and Gallery in Fort Worth, and the seven founders of Project Row Houses (PRH) in Houston, James Bettison, Bert Long Jr., Jesse Lott, Rick Lowe, Floyd Newsum, Bert Samples, and George Smith, who were also inspired by Biggers.

McAnthony’s Multicultural Studio and Gallery, PRH, and Kinfolk House are vastly different spaces but converge on the concepts of placekeeping and that art happens everywhere and need not exist in the vacuum of an arts district or within traditional white-walled galleries and museums. Established in 1999, McAnthony’s gallery is also situated in a house on the east side of Fort Worth, just two miles away from Kinfolk House. For over two decades, the space has hosted artist workshops and exhibitions featuring works by African American artists working in various disciplines. PRH, established in 1993, has grown from its original block and a half of houses to encompass five city blocks with thirty-nine structures in Houston’s Third Ward, a historically Black neighborhood. The organization is equally rooted in the arts, community enrichment, and neighborhood development. Kinfolk House, like McAnthony’s, only consists of one specific home, but similar to PRH, it balances fostering artistic projects and offering relevant programming for the local community. Each of these unique spaces, and the ways they operate, are valid and important; they are shaped by their environment and their founders.

Like PRH, Kinfolk House was also physically shaped by its founder, as both projects began with a need for renovation. Kinfolk House was a labor of love among Sedrick’s family, friends, and sometimes students. In the twelve years between purchasing the house and establishing the organization, many people came together to repair, reshape, and renew the home. As he tore down sheetrock revealing the bones of the over hundred-year-old structure, Sedrick found remnants of the families that inhabited the house over the years—vinyl floor, wallpaper, even metal pieces like a license plate or tobacco tin held stories of the many lives of the home. Through the renovation experience, Sedrick came to understand that Big Momma’s house had always been home to many other people and that his family’s experience was merely one of many. Big Momma’s house belonged to the community, and it was imperative that it be opened as a gathering space where people from all walks of life could converge.

With nearly all of the walls and floors of the rooms in this nearly 1,800-square-foot home made of warm wood, Kinfolk House is unlike most art spaces. This combined with its massive front yard, large porch, back yard, and placement in a residential neighborhood creates an inviting and familiar mood. Visitors to the space often remark, “This reminds me of my grandmother’s house.”

The inaugural project, Welcome, which featured works by Sedrick and Letitia in conversation with objects that had belonged to Big Momma, sought to root the space in its history and Hallie’s legacy with visitors. Sedrick’s larger-than-life-size portraits extending off the canvas with texture filled the rooms, covering the windows, with images of family and friends who had spent time at Big Momma’s house. Letitia’s installation Any Given Sunday, combined church hats worn by her grandmother and Hallie arranged on a wall of the house opposite a painting by Sedrick. In a room, referred to as the chapel because it was filled with church pews from the church Big Momma attended, Letitia installed landscape photographs printed on fabric, some hung in large embroidery hoops and others quilted and hung like small blankets. The landscapes connected Big Momma’s birthplace of Weimer, Texas with her last home in Fort Worth.

Since opening to the public in early 2022, many exhibitions have been generated at Kinfolk House featuring artists who understand it is not a typical neutral site. From Angel Faz’s carved woodblocks featuring local business owners to Spencer Evans’s evocative drawings echoing the inner worlds of Black people navigating the white spaces and Kandy G. Lopez’s life-size yarn portraits, with each iteration, the house is transformed by the art, and the art is transformed by the house. It is a place with a history that invariably affects the art it contains.