Jessica Kincaid is a paradox. Out of all of the artists included in this group, she is the only with an MFA, yet her small beaded pictures are distinctly un-academic, more closely resembling “outsider art.” Her work, in fact, stems from a childhood hobby and doesn’t appear “outsiderish” simply because she is using beads. Several other contemporary artists, including Liza Lou or Kori Newkirk, for example, use beads as their primary medium. Rather, Kincaid’s subjects eschew any sort of contemporary trends, conventions or irony. This in combination with their small scale, the historical significance of beads in ancient civilizations (especially African and Native American cultures) and the traditions of women’s decorative craftwork in this country, lend her work a peculiarity that positions it slightly outside of the mainstream. With a grandmother who quilted, Kincaid is familiar with a humble and laborious craft tradition, and has immense patience and manual dexterity to weave such tiny beads and thread into glorious pictures that seem to emanate light. It was the book How to do Beadwork by Mary White (1972) that first inspired Kincaid to collect beads and make beadwork as a child. Her interest in fiber, weaving, textiles, and more generally “interlacement processes” persisted through art school where she made three-dimensional beaded objects. In 1994, she made her first two-dimensional pictorial beadwork, which continues to be her preferred format to date, with subjects that derive from personal sources, such as the body and religion, yet with unspecific meanings attached to them.

     Kincaid was diagnosed with epilepsy in the early 1990s—a moment that figures greatly into her work—although she incorporated bodily imagery before this event. In her abstract works such as the MRI scans against monochrome backgrounds, Kincaid posits an unusual question about the relationship between pattern, decoration and scientific imaging. Beads are generally used as embellishment and décor, while scientific imagery has a very specific function to provide information about the body, so to combine them creates an odd tension. Her work could be characterized as being generally “of the mind” including both the fantasies of memory or imagination and the physiological source of such thoughts and reverie. One of Kincaid’s most striking and mysterious works, Heaven and Earth, which she started while in high school, was inspired by an image she found of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet (the former residence of the Dalai Lama) and a Bible story about how one can’t imagine heaven. Its mirror image suggests what Heaven and Earth might look like. Another work, Sleepwalking in the Garden, started out as a scene of the Garden of Eden and then transformed into a dreamlike landscape of the artist’s memory. The piece is an allusion to the artist’s preference for wearing long dresses when she was seven years old, in a setting inspired by a location near a family home. With open-ended narratives, past and present are conflated in these intimate works, which begin as drawings to map out colors and compositions and ultimately retain this personal and small scale.

Julie Rodrigues Widholm

Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

September 2007

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