Missouri artist Kahlil Robert Irving explores perception and modern life in Nerman Museum exhibit | KCUR

Kahlil Robert Irving’s studio in south St. Louis is part workspace and part repository of a decade of his artwork. In a large, high-ceilinged warehouse, he keeps the printing press he uses for selected pieces. On the other side of the room is the kiln where he meticulously fires and refires his ceramic sculptures.

In between sit wooden crates on pallets, many storing finished sculptures that have been exhibited around the world. Stenciled letters on some crates stacked on the ground reveal their one-time destination: Singapore.

Across 13,000 square feet, Irving’s rambling studio also includes a side room where he stores his drawings and paintings. On the walls are works by other artists. In a large office space with a couple of couches placed in the middle, a studio assistant works at a computer one recent morning.

“I think I have a different level of investment in what I do than most of my colleagues and most people,” said Irving. “That’s because I put everything into my practice. This is my life’s work.”

That work has earned the St. Louis native a good deal of renown. At 31, he’s already exhibited a solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and shown his work in London, the 2019 Singapore Biennial and across the U.S. Last year, Cultured magazine awarded him its first Young Artists Prize.

Irving now has solo exhibitions on view simultaneously at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art outside Kansas City and the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum. The show at the Kemper, “Archeology of the Present,” is an updated iteration of his exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis last year. Irving also curated “Space Mapping,” a concurrent exhibition at the Kemper of short films by seven artists depicting everyday life in African American communities.

He grew up in neighborhoods around St. Louis, took pottery classes and was active at the YMCA and attended graduate school at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. After working and teaching elsewhere for several years, Irving returned to St. Louis full time in 2020.

His work incorporates ceramic sculpture, digital collage, painting, video and just about any medium he can find a way to put to use. Influenced by hip-hop culture, he often gives his sculptures long titles, sometimes employing multiple colors and typefaces or unconventional punctuation. The show at the Kemper includes an alternate Missouri state flag.

Most of the pieces in “Archeology of the Present” are presented on, or within, a wooden platform raised a few feet from the ground, that museumgoers walk around on. Some of his work is displayed within openings in the platform that viewers look down into, such as a ceramic square that mimics the appearance of asphalt. Elsewhere, a ceramic sculpture that seems at first to be a brick chimney rises out of the platform and above visitors’ heads.

The effect is something like examining a contemporary city street through an archeological dig.

The exhibition includes one of Kahlil’s amassment sculptures — a large, heavy piece that looks a bit like found objects fused together in a concrete base, but is again a ceramic work from Irving’s kiln. The one now at the Kemper, “Caution MASS(in the bank) | Media flow + Ground Swell / Pipes tubes Chimney,” includes among its many objects a ceramic apple and cinder block.

Bits of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, about the 2019 incident in which a KTVI newscaster referred on air to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with a racial slur, are fused into some of the objects’ surfaces. Look carefully, and you can also spot a small photo of the artist.

“The goal is to fool the eye and play with the eye,” Irving said. “I’m not making things for everybody to get every reference. Some people will understand certain things and a lot of people won’t — because of the parts that specifically relate to certain life experiences, interests and creative desires that I think are more relevant to people who have a cultural background similar to my own.”

On a recent morning, Kemper Art Museum Associate Curator Meredith Malone, who organized the exhibition, points to some of the details in Irving’s work. One piece, a slab of black granite, has a digital collage carved into its surface with an industrial milling machine. The collage includes a QR code that references Irving’s exhibition at MoMa. There’s also an image of a sculpture by Thomas Ball that the museum owns a version of.

“He’s making sort of an imperfect artifact of a contemporary moment,” Malone said. “He’s using collage and fragmentation to make a commentary about how we hold memory, how we understand the culture or the place that we’re living. And so it’s a reference to the deeper past, but also to our present moment.”

Ball’s 1875 sculpture celebrates the Emancipation Proclamation by depicting Abraham Lincoln standing by a formerly enslaved man who is kneeling before him. The model for the emancipated man was Archer Alexander, who was born into slavery in Virginia but lived much of his life in and around St. Louis. Ball’s memorial still stands in Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C. In 2020, Boston officials removed a copy of the statue that had long been on public display there.

That visual detail in Irving’s piece is a breadcrumb leading toward his next work: a reimagined version of Ball’s statue, commissioned for an upcoming show at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

“I would like to propose a new monument for the rose granite pedestal in Tower Grove Park,” Irving said, referring to the spot from which park officials removed a statue of Christopher Columbus in 2020.

Irving cites the architecture and history of brickwork and industrial ceramics in St. Louis as influences on his work. But his perspective is anchored not just by those connections but by much deeper ties.

“It’s about the fact that my relatives that were enslaved and moved to St. Louis from varied paths. And I am born to the stock of those people moving here,” Irving said. “When I think about my family’s history, when I think about where I come from and who I come from — that’s why St. Louis matters.”

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