Shawn Huckins 'Beaver Moon' Print Release Details
Artist: Shawn Huckins
Title: Beaver Moon
Medium: Giclee Print
Size: 23 x 27.5 Inches
Edition: 35
Price: £600
*available at 11am EST on Thursday November 13th, 2025
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Shawn Huckins is a New Hampshire born painter who cracks open American mythmaking with a wink. After earning a BA in Studio Art from Keene State College and the University of Wollongong in 2006, he began meticulously recreating eighteenth-century portraits, then slipping twenty-first-century text beneath powdered wigs: LOL, BRB, tweets and emoji float across colonial faces like digital ectoplasm. The collision is both joke and inquiry, asking whether emojis erode the eloquence that once fueled revolution.
Working without Photoshop, Huckins projects archival images onto linen, masks off crisp lettering with tape, and builds luminous skin tones through weeks of glazing, ensuring every serif and beauty mark is hand-painted. Recent series conceal sitters behind vibrant quilts or Roman busts shattered on the floor, suggesting history is a comforting blanket and a crumbling weight we simultaneously hide behind and drag forward.
Exhibitions at Richard Heller Gallery, Duran Mashaal Montréal and K Contemporary Denver regularly sell out, while museums such as Boston MFA and Tucson Museum of Art have added his canvases to permanent collections. Grants from the Haven Foundation and Colorado Creative Industries support his practice, yet he still posts studio jokes to Instagram, believing humor is the fastest bridge between art and audience. Whether depicting George Washington with a notification bubble or draping founding fathers in psychedelic fabric, Huckins insists that laughter can open a back door to critical thought, inviting viewers to chuckle first and question second how a nation so eloquent at birth now speaks in disappearing stories.
