Projects: Kahlil Robert Irving

Projects: Kahlil Robert Irving presents an installation of sculpture, digital, and two-dimensional work wrapped around the gallery as site-specific wallpaper. Drawing from the vast scroll of digital culture—which the artist describes as “an everlasting feedback loop of my experience”—he mines the Internet as a living archive of Black life, death, remembrance, celebration, and survival.

Irving creates dense assemblages of images and replicas of everyday objects.This exhibition brings together imagery ranging from a Facebook post commemorating the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor and a screenshot of an article on Betty M. Wheeler, the founder and longtime principal of Metro High School, a storied “school without  walls” in St. Louis; to memes featuring hip-hop duo OutKast and Kanye West and Kim Kardashian; to visual reflections on American protest and the ongoing dialogue about Confederate monuments. From this cache of images, Irving creates decals and applies them to architectural surfaces in a layered compositional process. These decals also appear on his ceramics, which Irving creates using a labor-intensive technique. Firing individual pieces multiple times in the kiln to achieve his intricate layering of image, glaze, and color, he has forged a style that challenges distinctions between the work of the hobbyist, the artisan, and the artist.

Organized by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, with Legacy Russell, former Associate Curator, Exhibitions (now Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen). This exhibition is part of a multiyear partnership between The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1.

The exhibition is free and open to the public without a ticket (at limited capacity). Visitors can enter at street level, and must go through a temperature and bag check before heading to the galleries. Masks are required for all visitors. More information about how to visit safely can be found on MoMA's website.