Vanguard Spotlight: Kahlil Robert Irving’s Practice Grows in New Solo Museum Show
Kahlil Robert Irving, HE IS A MAN | Daily Mystery Law and Order - Serenity for US ALL, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
Despite fearsome global circumstances and the numerous exhibition postponements that followed, 2020 was a year of great achievement for Kahlil Robert Irving. His referential sculptures and collages, layered with the physical and digital debris of Black life, earned him a spot in The Artsy Vanguard alongside some of today’s most exciting artists. By year’s end, he had also participated in the Great Rivers Biennial at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and mounted a solo show at San Francisco’s Jenkins Johnson Gallery.
In the time since, Irving has continued to rack up institutional accolades. In 2021, the Museum of Modern Art presented his first major solo museum show, co-organized with the Studio Museum in Harlem. That same year, Irving also exhibited in the New Museum’s triennial “Soft Water Hard Stone,” a group presentation at MASS MoCA, and more. Now, Irving has a new solo show, “Archaeology of the Present,” on view at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center from March 1, 2023 through January 21, 2024.
Kahlil Robert Irving, installation view of “Archaeology of the Present” at the Walker Art Center, 2023. Photo by Kameron Herndon. Courtesy of the Walker Art Center.
Irving’s practice reflects a deep fascination with urban landscapes: His best-known works are sculptures embedded with ceramic facsimiles of litter, which gesture to the shortcomings of city infrastructure and under-examined stories of urban communities so often swept away like last week’s trash. For “Archaeology of the Present,” Irving created a built environment of his own. Visitors encounter his work by moving across a wooden platform from which a large brick pillar, Stele [(A scraper)] (2023), rises. The material references the architecture of Minneapolis; it may also allude to the complex, racialized history of brick-making in Irving’s hometown of St. Louis, a topic the artist has probed in previous work.
Irving encourages further engagement with this structure by situating much of his work in cut-out sections of the floor. In order to see the art, viewers must also examine the ground on which they stand. This consideration is reified by the work itself, which includes ceramic tiles made to resemble asphalt. Nearby, a video installation riffs on tensions between the ground and the sky. “I live on this ground, but I have been told from a Eurocentric perspective that the answers to my dreams come from above,” the artist said in an interview with William Hernández Luege, who curated the Walker presentation. Irving rejects this fantasy of divine providence. With the exhibition title, he frames the here and now as worthy of study and preservation.
“Archaeology of the Present” reflects an ongoing expansion of Irving’s practice from objects to environments—a direction that his solo exhibition at MoMA anticipated with its sprawling collages that covered and climbed the gallery walls, immersing viewers in a cacophony of imagery. As his status in the art world grows, the ambition and scale of Irving’s projects are sure to follow suit.
