The Collection

Basil Kincaid is a post-disciplinary artist whose practice spans quilting, collage, photography, installation, and performance. Working between the United States and Africa, Kincaid creates layered textile wall hangings and immersive environments that investigate relationships among ancestry, place, and the contemporary constructed self. Drawing on found, salvaged, and donated materials imbued with emotional and memorial resonance, Kincaid’s work treats traditional craft as a living, evolving form—what the artist has described as a kind of spiritual technology shaped by values of family, imagination, rest, and lived experience.

Central to Kincaid’s practice is an exploration of belonging and diasporic identity. Through improvisational, community-oriented processes, the artist examines the gradient between inherited histories and self-authored futures, using quilting and assemblage to draft alternative cultural fabrics. Resourcefulness and freedom of imagination are foregrounded as means of discarding inherited social constraints and articulating new modes of collective and personal liberation.

Kincaid studied drawing and painting at Colorado College, graduating in 2010. In 2019, they debuted their first museum performance, The Release, at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. Subsequent projects have expanded the performative and ceremonial dimensions of their work, including site-responsive installations and textile interventions in public and institutional contexts. In 2022, Kincaid presented new quilt works in The New Bend (curated by Legacy Russell) at Hauser & Wirth in New York and Los Angeles, and in New African Portraiture (curated by Ekow Eshun) at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria.

Kincaid’s work has been exhibited with Hauser & Wirth, Mindy Solomon, Kravets Wehby, Kavi Gupta, Carl Kostyal, and others, and has been featured in projects such as Dancing the Wind Walk (2023), a semi-permanent fabric monument presented during Frieze Los Angeles with support from the Art Production Fund. In 2023, Kincaid presented the solo exhibition Spirit in the Gift at the Rubell Museum, where they were also an Artist in Residence. Honors include the Regional Arts Commission Fellowship (2020) and designation as a United States Artist Fellow (2021). Kincaid’s work entered the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2021.