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In 2019, alarmed by the trampling of political and social norms and the moral decay of the first Trump administration, Ted Kincaid began working on a series of new images which became the five prints comprising The Kakistocracy Portfolio. This was a radical and urgent pivot from the chromatic exuberance and digital surrealism that long characterized his artistic practice, one that veered into sociopolitical critique. Best known for his richly colored cloudscapes and investigations into the porous boundaries between the real and the imagined, Kincaid has consistently explored liminal spaces—psychological and perceptual interstices where meaning and memory remain in flux. With The Kakistocracy Portfolio, however, he introduced a markedly different tenor: urgent, caustic, and overtly political. Ted Kincaid’s prints resonate with renewed intensity since the results of the 2025 American presidential election.
The term “kakistocracy”—derived from the Greek kakistos, meaning “worst”—denotes governance by the least qualified or the morally bankrupt. While the concept is by no means new, it has acquired renewed relevance in recent years, particularly within a sociopolitical climate marked by increasing institutional failure, disinformation, and public violence. Kincaid, a Dallas, TX art teacher, engages with this condition from the perspective of both citizen and educator, keenly attuned to the psychic toll that recurrent school shootings have exacted on students, faculty and communities. These events, sensationalized in the media, have become the new normal, to the point of political paralysis. Kincaid positions this cultural stagnation as a conceptual fulcrum for the portfolio.
One of the most emblematic works in the series, Thoughts and Prayers, draws its title from a now-familiar refrain that emerged with particular intensity following the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The phrase, once intended to express condolence, has since become an indictment of Congressional inaction. Kincaid reframes it within a visual vocabulary drawn from 16th-century religious and memento mori iconography. The result is a densely layered composition replete with skeletal forms, organic detritus, and aqueous, moiré-like textures—elements that together evoke a spiritual theater in decay. The work functions simultaneously as historical pastiche and contemporary critique, rendering visible the contradictions between public mourning and political inertia. The reference to the Epistle of James—“faith, if it is without works, is dead”—further underscores the hollowness of performative empathy.
In Divergent Truths, Kincaid continues his engagement with epistemological breakdown. A portrait of an aristocratic figure—visually elegant but optically askew—functions as a metaphor for the disjuncture between appearance and perception, leadership and vision; a visual pun on blind leadership, or willful blindness, in an age where reality is so bitterly contested. The subject’s misaligned gaze signals a deeper pathology: the inability or unwillingness to apprehend reality as it is. Within the context of of the present information ecosystem, saturated by conspiracy theories and strategic disinformation, the image resonates as an allegory of institutional delusion.
The Kakistocracy Portfolio was published by Temple Monkey Editions in 2019. The five photo-etchings are printed in sepia ink on Hahnemühle Copperplate paper in editions of 10. The image size is 15″ x 12″, the sheet size is 23″ x 19″. The prints are signed and numbered in pencil by the artist. The portfolio is available from Manneken Press only as the suite of five, which is housed in a portfolio case with a digitally printed colophon.
