Venus Over Manhattan is pleased to present River, Frog and Crescent Moon, the artist’s first New York solo exhibition, featuring a series of recent quilted, embroidered, and sculpted works. Through reworking and recontextualizing these raw elements, Kincaid offers alternative perspectives from which to consider how context and conditioning impact our identities and self-expression. Kincaid’s practice reckons with notions of Black displacement and the strictures and implications of an oppressive, violent and carceral state on Black people, while concurrently deriving a numinous and metaphysical expansiveness from the ancestral wellspring of knowledge, resilience, and joy that the artist’s work is equally steeped in. Salient in this body of work is a concept of connection or communion to one’s ancestors and forebears. Investigating the “comforting hands” of ancestry and the infinitude of this lineal knowledge, hands appear visually and metaphorically throughout Kincaid’s quilts and embroideries, acting at turns acting as symbols for a shared spirt and cosmic interconnectedness while also evoking the labor and love, both physical and emotional, of ones predecessors. “Ultimately...the goal is to get back to nature and nurture...that expansive yet rooted feeling of wholeness and belonging. Where all things are, and are meant to be, shared.” —— Basil Kincaid ✨ @basilkincaid @v_over_m ✨ 1-3. Basil Kincaid, "Melanin Activation: Sun Harvest," 2020-2022. Quilt; 106 x 91 in (269.2 x 231.1 cm). 4-5. Basil Kincaid, "Whispering My Love," 2022. Embroidery and hand-woven cotton fiber on canvas; 69 x 89 in (175.3 x 226.1 cm). 6-8. Basil Kincaid, "Exfoliating in The Sea, Swept Up in the Shallow Surf," 2020-2022. Quilt; 106 x 87 in (269.2 x 221 cm). 9-10. Basil Kincaid, "The River," 2017-2022. Quilt; 104 x 204 x 12 in (264.2 x 518.2 x 30.5 cm). #venusovermanhattan #basilkincaid #textilecomposition #spiritualinheritance #freedomofimagination #selfexpression #interconnectedness #laborandlove #embroideryart #saintfleurinc