Art At Noon: An Emancipation Conversation

Art At Noon lectures are supported by the Leftkoe family, in memory of a beloved member of the docent corps, Mildred T. Leftkoe.

Images: John Quincy Adams Ward (1830–1910), The Freedman, 1863, bronze, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, 2000.15;   Letitia Huckaby (b. 1972), Ms. Jocelyn, 2022, Pigment print on fabric with embroidery, Courtesy of the artist and Talley Dunn Gallery. 

Margaret (Maggie) Adler is Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Adler’s scholarly research focuses on nineteenth-century art, but consistent with the Carter’s commitment to fostering cross-temporal connections, she often collaborates with living artists on site-specific installations, including Gabriel Dawe, Mark Dion, and Justin Favela. Following a 2019 gallery remodel, Adler played a critical role in the museum’s collection reinstallation that reconceived how visitors interact with the collection by emphasizing unexpected visual and scholarly relationships between historic and contemporary works. Since joining the Carter in 2013, Adler has organized numerous exhibitions, including Horizon Lines (2017); In Our Own Words: Native Impressions (2018); The Perilous Texas Adventures of Mark Dion (2020); Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington (2020); Sandy Rodriguez In Isolation (2021) and the current exhibition Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation (2023). Prior to coming to the Carter, Adler held the Barra Fellowship at the Philadelphia Museum of Art after serving as Director’s Office Fellow at the Williams College Museum of Art, where she worked on projects with artists Jenny Holzer and Pepón Osorio. Adler also held the position of Director of Development at the Addison Gallery of American Art. Adler’s publication highlights include Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation (published by University of California Press, 2023); Homer|Remington (distributed by Yale University Press, 2020); and an essay contribution to Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). Adler holds a Bachelor of Arts in classical languages and the history of art and a Master of Arts in the history of art from Williams College.

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.