Join Great Rivers Biennial 2024 artist Basil Kincaid for an artist conversation with Bisa Butler. The two will explore shared themes and practices engaged by their artworks, including family influences, fabrics and quilting, and a range of influences from Ghana to the American South. The conversation will be moderated by Associate Curator Misa Jeffereis.

This talk was originally scheduled for Friday, October 4 as part of First Friday: Celebrating Basil Kincaid.

Registration is encouraged; please click here to sign up. Doors open at 5:30 pm.

About the Artists

• Through her dynamic, celebratory quilted portraits of people of African descent, Bisa Butler (b. 1973, Orange, NJ) investigates the purposes and potential of portraiture within the Black historical narrative. Butler’s influences range widely from personal family scrapbooks to American folk traditions and AfriCOBRA philosophies. Although her finished works are made entirely of textiles, Butler approaches the medium from a painterly perspective. Sourcing imagery mainly from photographs, she uses layered fabrics and quilting to create unique compositions, psychological depth and detailed textures that she found missing from her paintings. By returning to textiles, Butler has reconnected with her family’s history since it was her grandmother and mother who taught her to sew. Bisa Butler lives in South Orange, New Jersey and has a studio in Jersey City. Butler earned her BFA in painting at Howard University, Washington, D.C. in 1995 and holds a MAT in teaching art from Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her work has been exhibited widely, both domestically and internationally. In 2020, Butler had her first institutional solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami. The World Is Yours, Butler’s first solo exhibition with Jeffrey Deitch, in 2023 in New York, was enthusiastically received and attracted thousands of visitors.
• Basil Kincaid (b. 1986, St. Louis, MO) is an artist who honors and evolves traditional practices through quilting, drawing, collaging, photography, installation, and performance. Kincaid received his BA in drawing and painting at Colorado College, Colorado Springs and has exhibited works with Hauser & Wirth, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Kravets Wehby Gallery, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Carl Kostyál, and others. Kincaid has received fellowships from the Regional Arts Commission, St. Louis, and United States Artists. Recent solo exhibitions include The New Bend at Hauser & Wirth, New York and Los Angeles locations; New African Portraiture at the Kunsthalle Krems, Austria; All in One Feeling at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami; Dancing the Wind Walk, a semi-permanent fabric monument during Frieze Los Angeles 2023, with support from the Art Production Fund; and a ceremonial installation at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, among others. Kincaid’s work is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.