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Exhibition Details

PRESS KIT
 

Driven by the quest to understand the texture of his own personal and cultural identity within the African diaspora, filtered through the superstructures of his American experience, artist Basil Kincaid (1986, St. Louis, Missouri) debuts a new body of works in the Milan headquarters of the Galleria Poggiali with his first Italian solo exhibition titled The Rolling Fields to My House.
Through collage, photography, installations, performance and, especially, the technique of quilting – made using found, salvaged or donated materials – Basil Kincaid questions social practices while designing alternative cultural fabrics. Resourcefulness and freedom of imagination emerge as critical components in the liberation of the spirit. Co-creating places that stimulate the ancestral memory of love is understood as inborn freedom, activating space to participate in shared liberation on a local and global scale. The Rolling Fields to My House employs the practice of ‘world building’ to create belonging. The quilts, the sculptures and the drawings displayed in the exhibition represent the inner communication cultivated by the artist to arrive at a place that had meaning for the only black kid in a class of whites. Kincaid’s move to Ghana in 2020 allowed him to revisit worlds previously developed and realised in new formats. The black entity that appears in these works is a solid root of self and observer: an omniscient witness in harmony with all the versions of self permeates the exponential dimensions. Arguably, an ever-present body that planned to encounter and explore the polychromatic nature of the black diaspora identity in various terrains, this time in Italy
In all his work, Basil focuses on how place moulds our perspective, the notion of belonging and the way in which we perceive. His work is made up principally of found or donated materials that have great emotional significance for those who once enjoyed them. The practice of quilting has a long history in his family, handed down over 7 generations. 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. “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," explains Basil Kincaid.
Basil Kincaid will be among the artists selected by Yinka Shonibare for the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London entitled 'Reclaiming Magic' on view from the 22h of September 2021. Basil Kincaid (born in 1986, St. Louis, Missouri) is a post-disciplinary artist whose research constructs, contemplates and reviews self-imposed and conditioned constructs and explores their fixity. Through the quilting technique, collage, installation and performance, created using salvaged or donated materials, Kincaid abandons social mores to draft alternative cultural fabrics. Kincaid studied drawing and painting at Colorado College, graduating in 2010. He has exhibited with the Kavi Gupta Gallery, Mindy Solomon, Kravets Wehby and Carl Kostyal and elsewhere. In 2019, Kincaid debuted with his first institutionally-commissioned work, the performance "The Release" at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation of St. Louis MO. Kincaid is part of the JP Morgan permanent art collection and in 2020 he received the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis and in 2021 he was selected for United States Artists Fellowship and his work entered the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
 

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