No artist showing at Frieze Los Angeles’s fourth edition has harnessed the fair’s new location at Santa Monica Airport quite as ambitiously as Basil Kincaid, who is sheathing a local pilot’s airplane in his distinctive quilts. Sited near the historic Barker Hangar, not far from the runway, Kincaid’s textile intervention has transformed the aerodynamic vehicle into a powerful sculpture laden with stories.
Basil Kincaid's quilts use textiles from St Louis and Ghana Eric Thayer
“The quilts surrounding the plane reflect distinct, important swaths of time in my development,” he says. “I wanted to use material from my different growth periods to acknowledge, further invest in and elevate every stage of the challenging journey that the artist undertakes.”
Called Dancing the Wind Walk (2023) after an excerpt from one of Kincaid’s poems, the piece was created in partnership with the Art Production Fund as part of the fair's Frieze Projects programme. It incorporates textiles he gathered in his hometown of St Louis, from thrift stores and in Ghana, where he has recently been based. “The constant in these materials is movement; they’ve all passed hands, and they’ve all had utility,” Kincaid says. “When material purposefully passes hands as such, it gains flight.”