_The phenomenal new exhibition Figurative Histories at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, Texas, is a quick trip into reflection, examination, and, ultimately, celebration of the psychological, social, and physical spaces Black humans did, do, and will occupy in our histories (recorded or not), our imaginations, our cultural record, and on this planet and perhaps beyond.

Figurative Histories presents work from 1973 to 2025 by four Texas-based artists. Spanning five decades and featuring a range of media—including photography, watercolor, and printmaking—the works of Earlie Hudnall Jr., Letitia Huckaby, Delita Martin, and David McGee speak to a common throughline of community, both real and constructed.

In his black-and-white photographs, Earlie Hudnall Jr. documents the people and places of Houston, with a spotlight on the city’s Third and Fourth Wards. From David McGee’s Avenging Angels series, seven not-to-be-effed-with, epically-depicted women may be dressed for leisure but their stances and gazes tell us otherwise. Letitia Huckaby’s silhouettes are portraits by proxy of a couple—two never-photographed pillars of Texas Christian University, which was erected on land where the couple had been enslaved. (Huckaby worked with the living ancestors of her subjects, who posed for the portraits.) And Delita Martin showcases new mixed-media work from her series The Song Keepers, which she said, “explores the liminal space between the physical and spiritual realms, where Black women’s stories are both seen and felt.”

The individual pieces are installed with a deliberate nod to the exhibition’s central theme of Black community building across time and space. Each artist’s work connects with the rest thematically and spatially. As a result, patrons can sit with each artist’s work separately and also as a group—community building within gallery walls.

_Upon entering the first gallery of the Moody Center, visitors are met with twenty-nine of Hudnall’s photographs clustered in three defined groups, all containing images taken between 1973 and 2013. Hudnall is seventy-nine, and the exhibition represents a broad stretch of his prolific career in Houston; and yet it is presented with a distinct aversion to the retrospective form. About this choice, Executive Director and Co-curator Alison Weaver said, “My goal was to show a range of [his] images over the years, not a chronological progression or linear narrative. The main selection criterion was that all of the images were taken in Houston, as I believe Earlie has been one of the most insightful and impactful chroniclers of our city.”

This choice makes evident the remarkable visual continuity that Hudnall’s work carries through the decades. Without checking dates, certain images are easy to place in time: Hudnall captures the creep of gentrification as it was taking place in Houston’s neighborhoods, and several photos reveal their eras simply in the absence of this or that skyscraper looming in the distance. But the overall seamlessness of the image selection, and the experience of taking in photograph after photograph without the burden of time, solidifies that the day-to-day continuum of shared experience is the focus. As Hudnall said at the exhibition preview, “I found a community similar to the one I grew up in in Mississippi—how people live, the universality of the human experience, what we do from day to day, how we talk, how we struggle, how we weep, how we rejoice.”

Leaving Hudnall’s work, visitors pass through glass doors and into the gallery featuring works by David McGee, Delita Martin, and Letitia Huckaby. It is a dimensional shift. Each artist’s work is deep in electric exchange with the others as they hang face to face on opposite walls. A rare thing to find in a gallery: a bit of empty wall space between each artist’s work reinforces the singular power of the individual collections. No artist overshadows the others, even though their styles and palettes are quite different. It is a harmonious grouping of three artists, cleverly echoing the three groups of Hudnall’s photos.

_Beginning with David McGee’s Avenging Angels: the portraits in this watercolor series are not quite life-size but large enough that most viewers will need to look up at the subjects’ faces. This dynamic invites the viewer to consider themes of power and dominance in their relationship to the works and the women depicted. Reinforcing this is the seriousness of the subjects’ expressions coupled with their formal poses and fancy dress. The effect is arresting. They are not our equals—they transcend us. (I thought this even before I noticed several of the Avenging Angels holding vials of poison or nunchaku as casually as one might a dish towel.) They radiate a calm held only by those fully cognizant of their own power. Or, to put it bluntly, they give “fuck around and find out” vibes.

Quieter but no less striking, Letitia Huckaby’s A Living Requiem comprises eight shadowy silhouette portraits ornately framed along a floral wallcovering that was inspired by wallpaper found in a North Carolina plantation. These are portraits of the living descendants of Charley and Kate Thorp, a married couple who, in the late 1800s, had been integral to the daily functioning of AddRan College—which later became Texas Christian University—since it opened in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1873. Charley, who was born into slavery in the 1850s on this land, married Kate after emancipation, and both worked many essential jobs throughout their years with the school.

Huckaby was selected by the university’s Portrait Project, which “commemorates historically marginalized and underrepresented members of TCU,” to create work in tribute to the Thorps, of whom no known photographs exist. Huckaby came up with the idea to make portraits of the Thorp’s living relatives as a means of representing the couple’s legacy in Fort Worth. The works draw attention to the fact that having family photographs is not to be taken for granted. That Huckaby needed the Thorp’s descendants to stand in for them surfaces the idea of the inequities of historic documentation and raises questions about how such inequities persist and manifest today.

_On the final wall are mixed-media portraits from The Song Keepers, a series by Delita Martin. These oversize portraits consist of multiple panels in various shapes connected by stitching and other means. The works demand close examination: the longer you spend with them, the more you’ll recognize their complexity of patterns, shapes, colors, lines. Martin, who has been experimenting with immersive installations, created these pieces for Figurative Histories, installing them directly on the gallery walls. Weaver said, “This new series was made for the Moody exhibition. It came directly from her studio, and is being shown for the first time.”

Also included in the exhibition—to the effect that they feel like a surprising supplement to the rest of the show—are 120 letter-size drawings from David McGee’s Tarot Cards series, an astute mélange with a cascade of cultural and linguistic touchpoints—some obvious, others obscure. The “cards” cross-reference each other and function as an extension of McGee’s Avenging Angels series.

Yes, Figurative Histories succeeds in claiming space for Black bodies and hidden, ignored, or erased histories. Viewed together, the work of Hudnall, Martin, McGee and Huckaby claims more than physical space: it hammers iron stakes down into the cement of psychological, spiritual, and socially constructed spaces, declaring full possession within a multiverse. These artists are not just issuing correctives to historical inequities of representation but designing alternate visions for the future.

Figurative Histories, curated by Alison Weaver, executive director, and Frauke V. Josenhans, curator, Moody Center for the Arts, is on view through August 16, 2025. There are also two multi-media accompaniments to the exhibition: a playlist curated by Houston artist and musicologist Tierney Malone, inspired by the works on view and the history of live music in Houston. On site, local DJ Amarie Gipson designed the reading room with a selection of art books that broaden the scope of the exhibition’s themes.