The Summoning

Basil Kincaid

Basil Kincaid is an artist and activist based in St. Louis City whose work bridges contemporary and traditional craft. His family has practiced the art of quilting for the past 100 years, and the artist cites his paternal grandmother Eugenia Kincaid, with whom he collaborates on his work at a spiritual level, as his most immediate influence. In quilted textile paintings that are at once tactile and ancestral, the artist builds layered narratives that reflect on the construction of perception and collective experience.

Kincaid’s 2017 performance project “The Summoning,” presented in collaboration with projects+gallery, was a participatory ritual, guided by the artist and his assistant “spirits,” that built upon the implications of this craft tradition while responding to the urban environment and social issues that the city is currently experiencing. The ritual took place within the domed walls of German architecture collective raumlaborberlin’s “Spacebuster,” a diaphanous, inflatable and movable piece of architecture consisting of a van retrofitted with a large inflatable that extended from the hatch and held up to 80 people, becoming a social space for temporary collective use. Guests were instructed to arrive wearing two layers of clothing, with an outer layer that may be cut into pieces. Upon arrival, participants were met by the assistant: two stoic guards wearing masks and staffs standing watch at the Spacebuster’s entry; two women draped in Kincaid’s quilt pieces, seated in thrones and poised to serve as silent sovereigns over the proceedings; and two collaborators who assisted the artist in the removal of his own clothing 

Scissors, needle and thread were then provided for each guest as they were led by Kincaid through the delicate process of cutting off their neighbor’s outer layer of clothing, while a DJ provided ambient sound under the cast of dim floodlights at dusk. Participants exchanged these fabric swatches and sewed them together into quilted squares composed of parts of their own clothes and parts of their neighbor’s. As friends, families and strangers interacted physically and spiritually, the performance achieved the purpose of stitching together a community within the safe haven of the breathing walls. As participants left, the patched squares were collected—which the artist later used to build a large quilted wall hanging that functions as a tangible record of the transitory communion, as well as an artwork in its own right.