The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
“Everything begins with the street….”
In an imagined state of still and silent being, before association and interpretation envelop it in their complicated contextual mesh, a street is hard, present, and objective, so Kahlil Robert Irving deals in material objects. A street is engineered, a motivated construction designed for conveyance and passage, for footsteps falling and tires turning en route to destinations, so Irving’s installations reflect consideration of access, movement, and the element of time. Infrastructure of community, an artery of a neighborhood, a prelude to a home: a street runs through multiple dimensions of social experience.
Threaded through Irving’s work are acknowledgments of the formative influences of familial bonds (homage to a grandmother, for example) and the geography of racial populations (specifically American Blackness in urban areas of post-industrial decline). A stage for actions and events, a street is a place of order, regulation, and oppression, of protest, resistance, and revolution. Irving’s work is shot through with indictments of the mechanisms for exerting and retaining white power in the American social structure, from the exercise of raw violence to institutionally embedded injustice. A palimpsest where blood and dust, oil and slough, toys and trash continuously accumulate and disperse like marks inscribed and erased, a street is a place of ephemerality but also a pantheon for the ghosts of history. Irving’s works are accretions of present bits (collages, assemblages, bricolage) that gather momentarily in installations and exhibitions, but they are also instances of archaeology, attempts to discern in fragments of historical strata something like the systemic origins of our transitory truths. Beyond all this, the street—Irving’s street—is an autobiographical trope, a metaphor in which all of the above converge in an ongoing lyrical epic, a subjective song of experience.
A Quest in Clay
Lining the street, rarely dominating but never relenting, clay has been a constant, a material that Irving began exploring at the age of twelve. During his studies at the Kansas City Art Institute, in Kansas City, Missouri, where he earned his BFA in art history and ceramics in 2015, he recognized the rudiments of a quest in clay: “A professor of mine, Russell Ferguson, said, ‘You know, ceramics can be a pot. It can be fashioned to look like something from life. It can also look like itself.’ For the last several years, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make my ceramic sculptures do that—how to fashion ceramics to deal with a political history, a material history, and a kind of object, the possibility of an object.” The attempt has been extraordinarily fruitful. In 2021, four years after completing his MFA at Washington University in St. Louis, Irving held a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. In less than a decade-long career since graduate school, he has shown work at a slew of other prominent venues, among them the Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, and Gagosian Gallery’s London, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong branches. Currently, he works from a 13,000-square-foot (1208-m2) studio in St. Louis, Missouri.
St. Louis is foundational, the local sub-base for the millings of the street. In Irving’s vision, the blackness of asphalt mingles with a roadway’s implications of travel to conjure the movement of his enslaved ancestors on various paths eventually converging on St. Louis. The city, he states, “is my family’s history. It’s where I come from.” The street absorbs this history and represents it, but only partially, fragmentarily, in a construction of units that present an impression of a tentative, evolving whole. The sculpture [ STREET & Stars | (Memories < > Matter) fair and FREEDOM ] Black ICE ], which figured in Irving’s 2019 exhibition “Black ICE” at Callicoon Fine Arts in New York, is a low 9-foot 2-inch × 14-foot 7-inch (2.8 × 4.5-m) platform supporting 80 greenish-black, hand-pressed stoneware tiles. The trompe l’oeil invocation of asphalt, enhanced by bits of white ceramic embedded in the loosely packed stoneware, serves as a matrix for a pieced-together narrative (if such a word can be used for a decidedly non-linear presentation). The record of experience seems sometimes narrowly personal (on the ersatz asphalt a decal-on-white-clay clipping from an Alfred University brochure—a scrap of ephemera, flotsam on an urban beach—evokes Irving’s time as a Robert Chapman Turner Teaching Fellow) and sometimes more collective (another illusionistic clipping bears the headline: “‘Time for the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again’: An Alabama newspaper editor wants to bring back lynching”). The personal and the collective are not, however, easily separated. Irving is acutely aware that one of the deadliest race riots in American history, which included incidents of lynching, occurred roughly a century ago in East St. Louis, not far from his studio, nor can he help but recognize echoes of endemic racism in the egregious police killings of African Americans in the St. Louis area in the 21st century.
Moments in Time
Concurrent 2024 exhibitions—“Archaeology of the Present” at Washington University in St. Louis and “AnticKS & MOdels + My theater to your eyes” at the Nerman Museum, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas—were among the latest iterations of the street, employing the installation format somewhat differently but perpetuating the layered and accretive complexity characteristic of Irving’s work. The former, consisting of a large, raised wooden platform with recessed inlays skirted by low railings, simultaneously conjured walkways constructed around building foundations in a national historic site and the gridded excavations of an active archaeological dig. “My desire,” Irving says, “is to make memorials to certain moments in time.” In an obvious sense, Archaeology of the Present commemorates the contemporary cityscape of a nation in which urban decay marks a decline of industry that has left populations—particularly populations of Black people—languishing among ruins. The installation refers to excavated asphalt through a black-earthenware-tile piece, Soul on Stars********, which includes a black 6½-foot (1.9-m), 3800-pound (1723.7-kg) vertical section of ceramic sewer pipe, an 11-foot (3.3 m) stele sheathed in faux-brick ceramic tile, and— under a Plexiglas vitrine that endows it with the rarified aura of the museum artifact—one of Irving’s Amassment works: trompe l’oeil ceramic, collage-inspired sculptures evocative of polystyrene take-out containers, empty beverage cans, and other throw-away by-products of consumerism accumulating amid the architectural detritus of inner-city decline. The less obvious artifacts are, of course, intangible, traces of an archaeology of the present in a Foucauldian sense: implications of the systemic substructure of discourse that perpetuates unequal possession of power and its consequences in social injustice.
AnticKS & MOdels + My theater to your eyes offered another perspective on Irving’s expansive, accretive, and hybridized song of the street, his “lyrical” strategy of “making space for my experience, my life experience, my reality, to be documented. I think,” he says, “about Lou Donaldson, a very important jazz musician that blended blues and bebop together: you know, the way one’s able to exist materially and add to the conversation.” Among such additions to the conversation as altered flags, black-stoneware evocations of asphalt, a diorama-like section of highway, videos, and even a foam boulder, several ceramic vessels, acquired at auction, hinted at Irving’s reflections on ceramics history. The first, an 1857 Edgefield jar thrown by the enslaved potter David Drake, asserted his focus on the issue of power: “how ceramics have been appropriated, adopted, co-opted, and how they have inextricable ties to enslavement.” The other examples, early 20th-century African American memory jugs—ceramic vessels converted into memorials through the decoration of their exteriors with mosaic-like encrustations of glass shards, china sherds, and small objects associated with a deceased person—suggested the complicated mingling of traditions in ceramics history while mirroring in condensed form the diverse and complex nature of allusions in Irving’s art. “The exhibition had the goal of contextualizing all my work,” Irving says. “It was an interesting way to look at all the references, the things that I’ve tangentially touched on. The exhibition was about theater in some capacity. That kind of framework allowed for so many things to be opened up.”
A Place Within Art
The trope of the street, the experiential, improvisational flow of music, the fertile space of theater; the integration of sculpture with found objects, assemblages, collage, and video; the exercise of power, the political history of a medium, the post-industrial architectural landscape, and the metaphor of archaeology: a program of diverseness and complexity has proliferated in Irving’s art since his days of undergraduate study in ceramics. Nevertheless, clay has remained foundational to his practice. “I love making things out of clay,” he asserts. “Clay is a material integral to my life, my well-being, the way I think about things, the way I do things. The political history and the racist history of ceramics, especially living in the Western world, appropriating and co-opting objects from other cultures to gain capital or control a market—those subjects are very important to me. All of that is a way that I think about art, how I think about my place within it.”
the author Glen R. Brown is a professor of art history at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
“Everything begins with the street….”
In an imagined state of still and silent being, before association and interpretation envelop it in their complicated contextual mesh, a street is hard, present, and objective, so Kahlil Robert Irving deals in material objects. A street is engineered, a motivated construction designed for conveyance and passage, for footsteps falling and tires turning en route to destinations, so Irving’s installations reflect consideration of access, movement, and the element of time. Infrastructure of community, an artery of a neighborhood, a prelude to a home: a street runs through multiple dimensions of social experience.
Threaded through Irving’s work are acknowledgments of the formative influences of familial bonds (homage to a grandmother, for example) and the geography of racial populations (specifically American Blackness in urban areas of post-industrial decline). A stage for actions and events, a street is a place of order, regulation, and oppression, of protest, resistance, and revolution. Irving’s work is shot through with indictments of the mechanisms for exerting and retaining white power in the American social structure, from the exercise of raw violence to institutionally embedded injustice. A palimpsest where blood and dust, oil and slough, toys and trash continuously accumulate and disperse like marks inscribed and erased, a street is a place of ephemerality but also a pantheon for the ghosts of history. Irving’s works are accretions of present bits (collages, assemblages, bricolage) that gather momentarily in installations and exhibitions, but they are also instances of archaeology, attempts to discern in fragments of historical strata something like the systemic origins of our transitory truths. Beyond all this, the street—Irving’s street—is an autobiographical trope, a metaphor in which all of the above converge in an ongoing lyrical epic, a subjective song of experience.
A Quest in Clay
Lining the street, rarely dominating but never relenting, clay has been a constant, a material that Irving began exploring at the age of twelve. During his studies at the Kansas City Art Institute, in Kansas City, Missouri, where he earned his BFA in art history and ceramics in 2015, he recognized the rudiments of a quest in clay: “A professor of mine, Russell Ferguson, said, ‘You know, ceramics can be a pot. It can be fashioned to look like something from life. It can also look like itself.’ For the last several years, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make my ceramic sculptures do that—how to fashion ceramics to deal with a political history, a material history, and a kind of object, the possibility of an object.” The attempt has been extraordinarily fruitful. In 2021, four years after completing his MFA at Washington University in St. Louis, Irving held a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. In less than a decade-long career since graduate school, he has shown work at a slew of other prominent venues, among them the Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, and Gagosian Gallery’s London, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong branches. Currently, he works from a 13,000-square-foot (1208-m2) studio in St. Louis, Missouri.
St. Louis is foundational, the local sub-base for the millings of the street. In Irving’s vision, the blackness of asphalt mingles with a roadway’s implications of travel to conjure the movement of his enslaved ancestors on various paths eventually converging on St. Louis. The city, he states, “is my family’s history. It’s where I come from.” The street absorbs this history and represents it, but only partially, fragmentarily, in a construction of units that present an impression of a tentative, evolving whole. The sculpture [ STREET & Stars | (Memories < > Matter) fair and FREEDOM ] Black ICE ], which figured in Irving’s 2019 exhibition “Black ICE” at Callicoon Fine Arts in New York, is a low 9-foot 2-inch × 14-foot 7-inch (2.8 × 4.5-m) platform supporting 80 greenish-black, hand-pressed stoneware tiles. The trompe l’oeil invocation of asphalt, enhanced by bits of white ceramic embedded in the loosely packed stoneware, serves as a matrix for a pieced-together narrative (if such a word can be used for a decidedly non-linear presentation). The record of experience seems sometimes narrowly personal (on the ersatz asphalt a decal-on-white-clay clipping from an Alfred University brochure—a scrap of ephemera, flotsam on an urban beach—evokes Irving’s time as a Robert Chapman Turner Teaching Fellow) and sometimes more collective (another illusionistic clipping bears the headline: “‘Time for the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again’: An Alabama newspaper editor wants to bring back lynching”). The personal and the collective are not, however, easily separated. Irving is acutely aware that one of the deadliest race riots in American history, which included incidents of lynching, occurred roughly a century ago in East St. Louis, not far from his studio, nor can he help but recognize echoes of endemic racism in the egregious police killings of African Americans in the St. Louis area in the 21st century.
Moments in Time
Concurrent 2024 exhibitions—“Archaeology of the Present” at Washington University in St. Louis and “AnticKS & MOdels + My theater to your eyes” at the Nerman Museum, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas—were among the latest iterations of the street, employing the installation format somewhat differently but perpetuating the layered and accretive complexity characteristic of Irving’s work. The former, consisting of a large, raised wooden platform with recessed inlays skirted by low railings, simultaneously conjured walkways constructed around building foundations in a national historic site and the gridded excavations of an active archaeological dig. “My desire,” Irving says, “is to make memorials to certain moments in time.” In an obvious sense, Archaeology of the Present commemorates the contemporary cityscape of a nation in which urban decay marks a decline of industry that has left populations—particularly populations of Black people—languishing among ruins. The installation refers to excavated asphalt through a black-earthenware-tile piece, Soul on Stars********, which includes a black 6½-foot (1.9-m), 3800-pound (1723.7-kg) vertical section of ceramic sewer pipe, an 11-foot (3.3 m) stele sheathed in faux-brick ceramic tile, and— under a Plexiglas vitrine that endows it with the rarified aura of the museum artifact—one of Irving’s Amassment works: trompe l’oeil ceramic, collage-inspired sculptures evocative of polystyrene take-out containers, empty beverage cans, and other throw-away by-products of consumerism accumulating amid the architectural detritus of inner-city decline. The less obvious artifacts are, of course, intangible, traces of an archaeology of the present in a Foucauldian sense: implications of the systemic substructure of discourse that perpetuates unequal possession of power and its consequences in social injustice.
AnticKS & MOdels + My theater to your eyes offered another perspective on Irving’s expansive, accretive, and hybridized song of the street, his “lyrical” strategy of “making space for my experience, my life experience, my reality, to be documented. I think,” he says, “about Lou Donaldson, a very important jazz musician that blended blues and bebop together: you know, the way one’s able to exist materially and add to the conversation.” Among such additions to the conversation as altered flags, black-stoneware evocations of asphalt, a diorama-like section of highway, videos, and even a foam boulder, several ceramic vessels, acquired at auction, hinted at Irving’s reflections on ceramics history. The first, an 1857 Edgefield jar thrown by the enslaved potter David Drake, asserted his focus on the issue of power: “how ceramics have been appropriated, adopted, co-opted, and how they have inextricable ties to enslavement.” The other examples, early 20th-century African American memory jugs—ceramic vessels converted into memorials through the decoration of their exteriors with mosaic-like encrustations of glass shards, china sherds, and small objects associated with a deceased person—suggested the complicated mingling of traditions in ceramics history while mirroring in condensed form the diverse and complex nature of allusions in Irving’s art. “The exhibition had the goal of contextualizing all my work,” Irving says. “It was an interesting way to look at all the references, the things that I’ve tangentially touched on. The exhibition was about theater in some capacity. That kind of framework allowed for so many things to be opened up.”
A Place Within Art
The trope of the street, the experiential, improvisational flow of music, the fertile space of theater; the integration of sculpture with found objects, assemblages, collage, and video; the exercise of power, the political history of a medium, the post-industrial architectural landscape, and the metaphor of archaeology: a program of diverseness and complexity has proliferated in Irving’s art since his days of undergraduate study in ceramics. Nevertheless, clay has remained foundational to his practice. “I love making things out of clay,” he asserts. “Clay is a material integral to my life, my well-being, the way I think about things, the way I do things. The political history and the racist history of ceramics, especially living in the Western world, appropriating and co-opting objects from other cultures to gain capital or control a market—those subjects are very important to me. All of that is a way that I think about art, how I think about my place within it.”
the author Glen R. Brown is a professor of art history at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.
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