The Transformation of Brandy Baghead & Other Evil Delights

Living and working in St. Louis, Tom Huck is sharply tuned into the history and current affairs of the American heartland. Huck scrutinizes American culture through a brutal lens, weaving together outrageous scenes and narratives. Although his large-scale woodblock prints are easy to appreciate for their meticulous detail and thoughtful compositions, the gruesome accounts of his worldview are not for the faint of heart — a bountiful orgy of food, sex, alcohol, and violence, all supporting his larger narratives of Americana: racism, warfare, greed, gluttony, and injustice.

Anchoring Huck's first exhibition in the Bay Area is a massive woodblock triptych, The Transformation of Brandy Baghead. In it, Huck gives painful consideration to how far people will go to transform themselves into something desired by the mainstream public: at its center, a woman undergoes cosmetic surgery surrounded by a team of Frankenstein-like mad scientists who stitch their patient — an ugly duckling — into a beautiful swan with cat entrails. Huck dramatizes the misguided American mainstream with fearless critique and a great sense of humor.

Huck's work has been collected by numerous museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the New York Public Library, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition was presented alongside Dark Americana, a twenty-artist group show surveying American artists' responses to the nation's current and historical state of affairs.