Kahlil Robert Irving
Site: Texas and Cherokee Street
Kahlil Robert Irving presents his first public sculpture - a new ‘prototype for a monument’ on a vacant lot at Texas and Cherokee Street. For MOBILE STRUCTURE; RELIEF & Memorial: (Monument Prototype for a Mass), Irving has created a large sculptural intervention that is both a model and a memorial. The sculpture serves as a simulacra to reference elements of both city and landscape, utilizing subtle glitches to abstract and unsettle the images in ways that reveal the underlying violence inherent to the present day United States. The work references how such violence is not always in view, but supports the structures that prop it up. Irving’s work often emerges from direct interaction with the streets of St. Louis, monumentalizing the material culture of the city in homage to his friends, family, ancestors, and those who have died or were murdered. It is a relic of our present time, and a draft towards a future.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kahlil Robert Irving is an artist born in San Diego, California, in 1992, currently living and working in the USA. He attended the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art, Washington University, in St. Louis (MFA, 2017) and the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA, Art History and Ceramics, 2015). In 2017, Callicoon Fine Arts mounted his first solo exhibition in New York titled Streets:Chains:Cocktails. Since then, Irving has opened his first major solo exhibition at Wesleyan University, titled Street Matter – Decay &Forever / Golden Age and his work has been included in exhibitions at the RISD Museum, Rhode Island; Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas; the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles; Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, New York; and St. Louis University, among others.
Irving’s work is in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; the Riga Porcelain Museum, Latvia; J.P Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York; The Ken Ferguson Teaching Collection at the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri; the Foundation for Contemporary Ceramic Art, Kecskemet, Hungary; and the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island.
