Peter Simek reviews two exhibitions at the Amon Carter Museum of Art, Forth Worth: Sedrick Huckaby: Hidden in Plain Site (through October 31) and Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey (through August 11).

Simek writes: "Huckaby’s act of repainting quilts disarms them as fetishized aesthetic objects while folding their weighted cultural meaning into the history of painting. The scale and shape of the piece suggest an altar piece, the folded fabrics are reminiscent of drapery in Renaissance paintings, and the patchwork of colors quote Byzantine mosaics. The cross formed by the edges of the canvases also offers a subtle play on the relation between surface and object… The coordination of Huckaby’s work with Bearden’s is inspired. Both draw from similar wellsprings: their religious and cultural traditions, their mutual love of jazz, an adaption-reuse of traditional crafts at the service of high art, and a desire to explore universal human themes through repurposed mythological representation. Their voices also prove complementary. Like Huckaby’s, Bearden’s roots are in the South, and his work touches on this narrative legacy, blending it with a sharp wit characteristic of 1950s Harlem. Huckaby’s quilts and cruciform filter a variety of world art historical traditions through the memory of a domestic Texas setting that blurs home and the church."