Library Street Collective is pleased to present Inward Cartography: Self of Selves, Basil Kincaid’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, opening March 15, 2025. The opening reception will take place from 11AM-1PM, featuring an artist talk at 11:30AM with Katie Pfohl, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the DIA. Please click here to RSVP for the opening reception.

Known for intricate textile works spanning quilting and embroidery, Kincaid often explores the power of action, intention, and the possibility of radical transformation through a spectrum of works that navigate abstract and narrative modalities.

Rejecting clear categorization, Kincaid's practice underscores the expansiveness of perception and the body—both in spiritual and digital realms. Crafted across continents, from the artist’s studio in St. Louis to Ghana and back, these fiber vignettes depict the emotional defragmentation of facing suppressed feelings and rewiring one’s societal, familial, and self-selected programming. Kincaid begins with drawing, then scanning and manipulating the work in Photoshop before embroidering the image and stretching it over bars much like a painting. Each stitch carries an echo of personal history, cultural memory, and a desire to mend the intangible.

In the artist’s latest body of work, Kincaid adopts an aerial perspective—a metaphorical 30,000-foot view—charting internal terrains as if they were physical landscapes. Ridges, valleys, and meandering rivers emerge through dynamic compositions where color and line act as conduits for emotion. These abstract maps document ephemeral experiences, capturing the shifting contours of selfhood and the blind spots left by personal upheavals. The cyclical dialogue between the tangible and the digital mirrors the complex interplay of our identities across these intersecting realms.

Kincaid’s work becomes both a reflection and a guide, charting a path through self-exploration, resilience, and the continuous process of becoming. In this way, the exhibition is as much an inward journey as it is an outward expression of mapping the unseen. Influenced by artists such as Anni Albers and Alma Thomas, and drawing inspiration from natural phenomena, meteorology, cosmic patterns, and digital aesthetics, Kincaid’s work is further enriched by the writings of Octavia Butler, Legacy Russell, and Salvatore Quasimodo. Through this confluence of visual and literary references, the artist offers a multilayered narrative that bridges the ancestral with the contemporary, and the corporeal with the cosmic.

Basil Kincaid: Inward Cartography: Self of Selves is on view from March 15 - May 21, 2025 at Library Street Collective.

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