SINCLAIR is proud to present its inaugural exhibition, A Certain Kind of Daring, featuring new work by artists Alexandria Couch and her mother, April Couch. 

With a practice that spans drawing, painting, writing and most recently quilting, Alexandria has developed an extensive index of materials within her work; and draws inspiration from her dreams, nightmares, family history and heirlooms. Her work is presented alongside that of her mother, an artist who has worked with wood, gourds, metal and ceramics for over a decade. A Certain Kind of Daring examines their use of materiality and patterning as an entry point to discuss labor, code, and the pursuit of generational liberation.

Central to the exhibition are three organic gourd vessels on which April has meticulously hand-drawn quilting patterns once used as navigational tools to inform people moving along The Underground Railroad. Employing the “safe house” pattern (resembling a checkerboard and symbolizing a place of refuge), the “bow tie” pattern (rotating triangles that inform someone they will be brought nice clothes to disguise themselves as a freed slave) and the “shoofly” pattern (a central square surrounded by triangles on all four sides to indicate a friendly “conductor” is nearby and can help), April’s sculptures serve as both vessels and guides. Through her laborious mark making, these gourds operate as a code, and a directive towards freedom which Alexandria carries forward in her work.  

Forceful yet discreet, the figures in Alexandria’s painted quilts sit crouched down, holding themselves tenderly for both safety and assuredness. Their limbs or hair are often seen stretched outward and upward, doubling and glitching, suggesting they are spirits or in the presence of one. However, these figures are not only witnesses; they transmute, set ablaze, and direct, bearing the weight of existing within multitudes, an all too familiar condition of the Black experience. 

The exhibition title pulls from James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni’s well-cited 1971 unscripted TV broadcast, A Conversation, which also plays within Alexandria’s sculpture on view The Teacher: Interstice. In their sprawling conversation on the state of gender relations and freedom within the Black community, the two discuss archetypes of people in the world. In Giovanni’s notoriously graceful and raw prose, she posits that people are divided into two binaries: stupid and bright. Baldwin rebuts that people are divided between “those who have a certain kind of daring, and those who do not”, and concludes that the amount of daring one possesses determines the cost you are prepared to pay to rebuke the illusion and captivity of whiteness. 

Through various methods, enslaved peoples and their descendants enact their “daring” in countless subverted and quotidian ways. Alexandria observes: “I think there is a quality within my mother’s, mine and our collective ancestors' work that directly underpin evolutions of postmodern abstraction. Through the repetitious act of patterning geometric shapes into symbols (in a similar manner that Mondrian, Warhol, Liechtenstein and many others within the formal art history cannon have received accreditation) subjugated peoples have developed a deep understanding of form and aesthetic autonomy which is constantly in a state of becoming, towards its own form of literacy. Carved out of an enforced culture and language, quilting simultaneously serves as a record, archive and a shot in the dark at a not-yet-materialized future of self-determination.”

Together, Alexandria and April Couch offer a meditation on inheritance, labor, and the insistence required to move toward liberation materially, psychologically, and historically. 

A Certain Kind of Daring is on view at SINCLAIR from February 22 - April 26, 2026. The gallery is open Thursday - Saturday from 6-9pm, and Sundays from 2-6pm or by appointment. 

Alexandria Couch is a painter and printmaker whose work explores themes of memory, self determination, and materiality. Based between New Haven, CT, New York and Ohio, Couch has exhibited nationally in institutions such as the James Cohan Gallery (New York), SoLA Contemporary (Los Angeles), New Image Art (Los Angeles), Akron Art Museum (Ohio), and as part of the 2022 FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art.

Her current work explores the slippery relationship between personal narratives derived from dreams, memories and family archives. Utilizing techniques in printmaking, painting, quilting, and assemblage, She aims to draw viewers into ever shifting worlds where shapeshifting becomes the routine.

The figures are often documented in states of flux. They are composed of experiences and reflections in which contradiction is inevitable. Using quilting as a primary vessel, recycled materials like thread, fabric, paint and furniture are used to hold, mend, and disrupt the space that the figures inhabit. To strip down constantly and rebuild becomes easier than wearing the same clothes. Change is comfortable. Change is necessary to live between dimensions.

Descended from a family who quilted out of necessity, the arrangement of materials became a simultaneous act of archiving and worldbuilding. Each singular piece becomes a vessel for collective narratives of the past present and future from ever-changing points of view. Couch is interested in what happens in the suspension of these compounding events and what it says about the human experience.

April Couch holds a graduate degree from Baldwin Wallace University in Business Administration and Management. She worked in finance for 17 years before deciding to stay home and raise her three children. As a self-taught artist, Couch creates complicated drawings on various materials that are built one line at a time. Patterns are combined in unplanned ways that grow and change, pushing the boundaries on what accumulation, repetition can produce. 

In 2025 Couch, along with her daughter and two sisters, visited their ancestral home in Wilcox County, Alabama. While there, they learned their family history is deeply woven into the fabric of the area which is world renowned for its quilts, specifically the now famous Gee's Bend quiltmaker community. Couch also visited the home where she and her siblings once lived with their grandmother and great aunt who were avid quilters, and found several quilts that they had hand pieced together. Couch was drawn to two of the quilts because of their bold simplicity and because they recalled patterns used during The Underground Railroad. The bold, simplistic designs of these quilts have inspired the work she is currently developing. 

April Couch has won many awards for her design work and sculptures. Design clients include The Akron Zoo, the Akron-Summit County Public Library, the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and the Akron Roundtable.