Basil Kincaid

In his own words, Basil Kincaid is “a Vessel,” “a Vivid Dreamer,” “a World Builder.” His work is guided by connection to “ancestral courage, insight, and imagination in concert with contemporary awareness and observation.” Just as importantly, it also extends a long tradition of radical art making—which includes, among other artists, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and David Hammons—that reimagines everyday materials and renders them powerfully symbolic. From his use of cut-up U.S. currency to highlight the impact of money and its pursuit on the black body (he cathartically used half his savings to make his first “money quilt”) to the use of his father’s old work shirts to fashion an assemblage titled The Making of a Man, Kincaid has become expert at material transformations of the profoundly allegorical kind. In his hands, a photograph clipped from a magazine becomes a meditation on the fluid nature of identity; in another instance, a piece of cloth invokes the history of an entire people from the Middle Passage until today. 

— CVF, USFCAM

“My quest is to understand the wild tapestry of my own personal and cultural identity within the African Diaspora, contextualized by the scaffolding of my American experience. I practice self-exploration, historical investigation, and critical social questioning to cultivate healing on a personal and cultural level, towards the remedy of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.

“Within my practice I promote empathy, curiosity, critical thought, and conversation. I observe how perception and prejudice impact one’s relationship to place, objects, people and their sense of belonging or displacement. My goal is to co-create healing sites that stimulate the ancestral memory of love as freedom within us, activating space to participate in shared liberation on local and global scales. I create experiences, objects, and spaces for private, interpersonal and ancestral connection. I write, quilt, collage, make installations, photograph, perform, and invent games as avenues of questioning. My work is primarily comprised of culturally contextualized, found, or donated materials or highly personal materials. I collect materials from people through social media as well as within my immediate surroundings. This methodology explores the seeming immateriality and physical/personal disconnection within online spaces while observing how waste is reflective of lived experience. 

“I am currently most interested in the practice of Quilting as a way to collaborate with ancestral energy and as a method of empowerment. I find it imperative to nurture the evolution of my creative family traditions, honoring my predecessors while adapting the practice to address the questions and concerns of contemporary life.

“My family is my driving motivation and primary artistic influence. Quilting as a practice is saturated on both sides of my family stretching back over generations. My immediate influence as a quilter is Eugenia Kincaid, my grandmother on my father's side. She appears to me in dreams, guiding my hands as we collaborate on a spiritual level. I strongly believe that Quilting opens a portal for me to exist with all of my ancestors that maintained the practice and potentially beyond. Upholding family traditions in the face of oppression is essential within my healing process. Quilting within the black cultural tradition has always served as a revolutionary space of joy, courage, and community in direct contrast to social and financial subjugation.

“My stylistic approach is influenced by the innovations, practices, and cultural products of Black Americans, and West Africans.  More specifically, I am interested in Black American folk and fine art, music, poetry, and family traditions.”

— Basil Kincaid