Art can be used to tell a story and Basil Kincaid does so through works often made using textiles. By painting with fabrics and threads, he creates quilted tapestries, three-dimensional sculptural pieces and embroidered canvases that talk to gallery and museum visitors, developing a narrative about the artist's own personal and cultural identity within the African diaspora, filtered through the superstructures of his American experience.
Born in 1986 in St. Louis, Missouri, Kincaid studied drawing and painting at Colorado College, graduating in 2010. He has exhibited in various galleries in America and his work entered the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He was also among the artists selected by Yinka Shonibare for the 2021 summer exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London entitled "Reclaiming Magic".
In his first Italian solo show at the Milanese branch of Galleria Poggiali, entitled "The Rolling Fields to My House", Kincaid is exhibiting (until 23rd December 2021) collages, photographs and installations. The most striking pieces remain his quilted works made using found, salvaged or donated materials. At times, he also incorporates in his self-portrait quilts, cut and stitched scraps of his own clothes.
This is a way to tell a story within a story as some of the recycled materials the artist employs may have great emotional significance for those who once enjoyed them.
Through his dramatic and colorful quilts, Kincaid questions social practices, ponders about his story and highlights the importance of freeing the imagination and liberating the spirit.
The black figure that often appears in his quilts is a symbol for the artist himself, almost a witness exploring the polychromatic nature of the black diaspora identity. In some of his quilts - symbolically made with old choir robes from a church in St. Louis - the artist also examines religious themes pondering how Christianity services and disservices Black people, by acting as a vehicle of liberation and of shame as well.Yet for Kincaid quilting remains first and foremost a way to pay homage to his culture and family: in the black cultural tradition, quilting has always served as a revolutionary space of joy, courage and community in direct contrast to social and financial subjugation.
Think for example about the quilts of Alabama-based all-black community Gee's Bend, that provided important African-American visual and cultural contributions to the history of art within the United States. Besides, slaves would make quilts for themselves and their owners: in the children's story "Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt" (1989) by Deborah Hopkinson, slaves used quilts as a means to share and transmit secret messages to escape slavery and travel the Underground Railroad. In the case of Kincaid, the practice of quilting has also got a long history in his family and it was handed down over 7 generations, but he had never expressed himself through this medium until he had a dream five years ago, upon returning from a residency in Ghana.
He dreamt of his grandmother Eugenia Kincaid standing in front of a two-story red brick house in St. Louis. Behind her the house was wrapped in a quilt while a golden energy flowed out of her body. Feeling as if he had been hit by her energetic aura, the artist woke up and knew he had to start making quilts. With no experience he started collecting bits and pieces of fabrics, taught himself the essentials of the craft and embroidery as well, and set out on a completely new aesthetic and creative path that turned into a way to pay homage to the women in his family who were never regarded as artists.
As Kincaid states in a press release for his Italian exhibition: "It's a way of honouring my predecessors while addressing the questions and concerns of where I am, where we are, today. It's a way to restore and reconstruct with the resourcefulness innate within us."
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