OC3 GALLERY
January 18 – February 22, 2025 | Danielle Ellis, ORACLE
An Oak Cliff native, Ellis’ work connects African Traditional Religion and history to the African diaspora through her work in digital collage, photography, and spiritual practices.
ORACLE encapsulates Ellis’ Brassfly Oracle Deck, a body of work she began developing in 2020. Presented as a suite of digital collage prints, the oracle deck is a celebration and commentary on African diasporic history and spirituality. Exploring connections to the African diaspora, Ellis pairs historical images reflecting African traditions with those of lived experiences of African Americans. Her digitally sourced imagery of objects, symbols, and photographs, while rooted in African cultural experience and religion, reflect the continuation and preservation of African cosmology throughout the African diaspora. As a body of work, ORACLE represents a convergence of experience and traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation and evolved through oppression. Deriving from African Traditional Religion, Ellis’ ORACLE includes a secluded altar in the center of the gallery, honoring the experiences and legacy of the African diaspora.
Danielle Ellis is an Oak Cliff native always ready to share her love of the arts with everyone at a moment’s notice be it painting live or holding workshops through her creative incubator Brassfly Studio. Her art education came from her parents, summer workshops at the South Dallas Cultural Center, attending Booker T. Washington High School of the Performing and Visual Arts and later The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She’s a member/producer of ArtLoveMagic, a member of We Here Collective and the Radical Love Collective. She is the creator of Mermaids Bring Water, a mutual aid initiative that provides clean water to communities in need with its focus on one of the last remaining Black Townships- Sandbranch, Texas and provided emergency bottled water to households across the metroplex during the Texan Winter Storm of 2020. Her work has been seen in multiple venues and events including the Dallas Museum of Art, Oak Cliff Cultural Center, Latino Cultural Center, and the State Fair of Texas. She is a recipient of the 2023 Juanita J. Craft Artist Residency at the South Dallas Cultural Center.
STUDIO
January 11 – February 8, 2025 | Letitia Huckaby, Selected Works from Bitter Waters Sweet
All artworks on view are courtesy of the artist and Talley Dunn Gallery
Bitter Waters Sweet is photographer and multimedia artist Letitia Huckaby’s carefully attentive and demonstrative contemplation of Africatown – its people, land, and history. Africatown in Alabama was founded by a group of West Africans from what is now Benin who had been trafficked on the last known U.S. slave ship, the Clotilda, five years before Emancipation and over half a century after the Atlantic slave trade had been outlawed. While official accounts failed to legitimize the community’s origins, over one hundred and fifty years later, their descendants have continued to keep the history of their ancestors alive from generation to generation. In Huckaby’s unique photographic works printed on cotton, the artist traces the threads of Africatown’s ancestors, their descendants, and their shared past and present, creating works of art that shine a light on the community’s history and the ways that legacy continues to be woven. Enveloping her subjects in both the language of adoring domesticity and a grandness harkening back to European portraiture, Huckaby looks beyond the veil to wade in waters once bitter, made sweet.
Letitia Huckaby has a degree in Journalism from the University of Oklahoma, a BFA in photography from the Art Institute of Boston (now the art school at Lesley University), and her Master’s degree from the University of North Texas in Denton. Huckaby has exhibited as an emerging artist at Phillips New York, the Tyler Museum of Art, The Studio School of Harlem, Renaissance Fine Art in Harlem curated by Deborah Willis, PhD, The McKenna Museum in New Orleans, the Camden Palace Hotel in Cork City, Ireland, and the Texas Biennial at Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum. Her work is included in several prestigious collections; the Library of Congress, the McNay Art Museum, the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, and the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Huckaby was a featured artist in MAP2020: The Further We Roll, The More We Gain at the Amon Carter Museum and State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum. Ms. Huckaby was a Fall 2020 Art Pace Artist in Residence and is represented by the Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas. Ms. Huckaby is the Co-Founder of Kinfolk House, a collaborative project space that inhabits a 100-year-old historic home, where community and art converge in the predominantly Black and Latina/e/o neighborhood of Polytechnic in Fort Worth, Texas and she is Texas Artist of the Year 2022.
She is represented by the Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas.
