The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024: Basil Kincaid

Still, drawing remains his “home base” to this day, acting as a generative entry point into other media, as well as a meditative habit that allows for a more intuitive, emotional impulse to guide his work. Kincaid’s small in-home studio is a universe of his drawings, with illustrations scattered on every surface, tacked to the wall, and spread across his drafting table. The pictures themselves often feature layered repetition, emphasizing similar outlines and silhouettes of faces and figures.

Drawing is also how he begins his mornings in his second studio in Ghana, using the practice to loosen up his wrists and get himself into the right headspace. His narrative quilts begin similarly; rather than tracing onto the fabric, he prefers to draw freehand over and over again until particular gestures and silhouettes come to the fore. Then, having built up a kind of illustrative muscle memory, Kincaid moves to the fabric and intuitively draws his outlines in chalk.

Kincaid took his first painting class while studying studio art at Colorado College (“I was like, oh man, this is like super drawing,” he laughed), and began learning about art history. But painting didn’t feel like a medium he could make a home in, and he struggled to find himself—the only Black student in the department—reflected in either lessons of art history or the broader art world in general. “Despite my fascination with it,” said Kincaid, “I felt equally alienated by it.”

After graduating in 2010 and returning to St. Louis, he resolved to learn more about Black art history, and help cultivate in St. Louis what he’d been missing from his college experience. Kincaid was part of a local DIY arts resurgence that helped nurture Black St. Louis talent like fellow post-disciplinary artist and occasional creative partner Damon Davis, artist and curator Katherine Simóne Reynolds, and later others like Kahlil Robert Irving, Vaughn Davis Jr, and Shabez Jamal.

Collage entered his practice after briefly teaching middle school art while living in New Orleans in 2013, prompted by his students’ seemingly undisciplined and imaginative approach to the medium. The following year, he was selected for a year-long arts residency in Accra, Ghana, through Boston-based organization Arts Connect International, which also provided three months of entrepreneurial training. Those lessons informed his choice to launch a business selling prints of his collages upon returning home to St. Louis, while still keeping an eye on the future value of his original pieces.

“Coming out of St. Louis, you learn merchandising first because you don’t have a lot of art collectors here,” he said. “People that have a lot of love and not a lot of money. Those people are buying art merchandise, which, to me, is still valuable. But I’m glad to have this other framework for how to position original works of art.”

He spent his time in Ghana working with textile artisans, tailors, and embroiderers whose work was sustained through familial art traditions, leading to his interest in patchwork-style quilts. When Kincaid’s aunt discovered the generations of quilters in their lineage while researching their family tree, it reaffirmed his new focus. But the medium truly took center stage after Kincaid had a dream in which he saw a St. Louis–style brick row house wrapped in a giant quilt, while his grandmother stood on the front lawn. Indeed, many of Kincaid’s performance and installation pieces seem to pay homage to that quilt-covered building, and involve either draping himself or objects in quilts and placing them in semi-overgrown urban landscapes.

“The quilt really started changing the way I think about artmaking, and the way I think about intelligence,” Kincaid said, adding that he had learned to “value the intellect of intuition and the spiritual nature of artmaking.”

Soon, he began to lean into the idea of ancestral connections leading his practice. “Working on these quilts is the first time where I felt spiritual assistance—where I felt like I’m not alone making these things…and saying, ‘OK, what is this thing trying to tell me?’” he explained. “I’m a conduit with the thing. And then at the end, I can sit down and listen to it.”

After returning home from Ghana, Kincaid was still working a part-time job alongside his art practice, though his income from selling art quickly began to outpace his regular work. As he drove around St. Louis delivering purchased prints himself, he used the opportunity to collect found objects, materials, and donated fabrics like old clothes, bolts of fabric, and choir robes to add depth to his creations.

“All these people had an emotional attachment to these materials, but no functional use for them,” he says. “That became a major through line of my work…materials that housed memorial content.”

He splits his time now between St. Louis and Klagon, Ghana, where he opened a second studio in 2020. He hired production assistants to assist with sewing the quilts and with detail work for his “embroidery paintings,” a newer body of work that bridges the artist’s drawings and quilted pieces. These works visually recall the figures and faces in his quilts, while the embroidery traces similarly illustrated lines with added texture.

In the room next to Kincaid, who was still doodling while sipping his watermelon juice, hung a few of these embroidery paintings. He was working towards a deadline for an upcoming group show at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, opening November 16th—his fourth this year. The artist kicked off 2023 with an eye-catching installation, Dancing the Wind (2023), at Frieze Los Angeles’s Santa Monica Airport site, followed by a presentation of his works throughout Rockefeller Center as part of its Art in Focus public art partnership in April.

On the horizon for next year? Kincaid has been selected for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis’s 2024 Great Rivers Biennial, which will be the first exhibition in his hometown since 2018. And now that he’s back home in St. Louis, he feels a greater pull to revisit and experiment with his more ephemeral performances.

“When I’m here, I feel more inclined towards making that type of work,” he said. “I think some of it has to do with the pace of life here, where I can process things a little more. I feel emotionally amplified in St. Louis.…Performance art—there’s no high like it. There’s no sensation—it’s like all your senses are firing at peak levels. You’re emotionally supple.”