This fall, the Rubell Museum D.C. museum hosted the opening night celebration for CODAsummit 2025, welcoming artists, commissioners, architects, and creative professionals from around the world to experience Material Witness and Basil Kincaid: Spirit in the Gift, two exhibitions that reflect the shared spirit of collaboration, material innovation, and artistic dialogue that defines both the museum and the Summit.
Material Witness presents 30 artists employing non-traditional materials and processes. Squid ink, Coca-Cola, ostrich eggs, anointing oil, lipstick, discarded metal, and animal hides are several of the preformed, natural, and unnatural mediums incorporated into three-dimensional works that expand upon the storied legacy of assemblage—a critical approach to artmaking that was first formalized in the 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. For many of these artists, Material Witness represents their first exhibition in our nation’s capital or at the Rubell Museum.
With echoes of land art, Arte Povera, abject art, and readymades these artists employ industrial waste, organic detritus, and mass-produced commodities to explore formal, environmental, political, and social concerns. Found objects in various entropic states provide the backbone for many of these works, illuminating cycles of consumption, decay, and renewal.
Basil Kincaid: Spirit in the Gift marks the first solo museum exhibition in Washington DC for Kincaid (b. 1986, St. Louis, MO). Four large-scale quilted artworks created during the artist’s residency at the Rubell Museum in Miami in 2023 are presented in the DC museum’s largest gallery. [Cover image: Basil Kincaid]
Kincaid’s work pays homage to the long history of quilt-making while exploring the relationships between identity, ancestry, and place. Some themes are deeply personal and autobiographical, others are more universal, but all evoke the joy inherent in the artist’s love for and nurturing of community. The entailed and labor-intensive process of creating these monumental works is balanced by an improvisational, spontaneous, and fluid quality that runs throughout them. The result is as indebted to freehand drawing and jazz music as it is to patchwork quilt making and embroidery.
Material Witness and Basil Kincaid: Spirit in the Gift are both drawn entirely from the Rubells’ unparalleled and ever-growing collection of contemporary art of more than 7,700 works. This presentation marks the fourth installation at the Rubell Museum DC, which opened in fall 2022 in the former Randall Junior High School, a historic school in Southwest DC that counts Marvin Gaye as one of its distinguished alumni. The exhibitions extend throughout the museum’s 32,000 square feet, which preserves the original layout of the historic school, with classrooms, teachers’ offices, an auditorium, and foyers transformed into galleries. The setting reinforces the role of artists as students and teachers making meaning of our world and encourages audiences to reflect upon the insights and perspectives communicated through their work.
Located at 65 I Street in the Southwest neighborhood, the Rubell Museum DC brings the Rubell Family’s extensive contemporary art collection to the nation’s capital. Dedicated exclusively to contemporary art, the Rubell Museum DC reinvigorates the building of the former Randall Junior High School, a historically Black public school built in 1906 and closed in 1978. The museum serves as a place for the public to engage with the most compelling national and international artists of our time. Admission is free for Washington DC residents.
Questions about CODAsummit or sponsorship?
Visit codaworx.com/codasummit or contact Suzanne at suzanne@codaworx.com
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