MoMA Presents the First New York Solo Museum Exhibition from Kahlil Robert Irving

The Museum of Modern Art presents Projects: Kahlil Robert Irving, on view in the Museum's street-level galleries from December 18, 2021, through May 1, 2022.

Kahlil Robert Irving is a multimedia artist based in St. Louis, Missouri, who creates dense assemblages of images and sculptural replicas of everyday objects. Drawing from an infinite scroll of digital culture, Irving mines the Internet as a living archive of Black life, death, remembrance, celebration, and survival. Projects: Kahlil Robert Irving is organized by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, and Legacy Russell, former Associate Curator, Exhibitions (now Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen), at The Studio Museum in Harlem.

The exhibition includes works made between 2018 and 2021, centering around site-specific wallpaper works that engulf the street-level space and depict a digital scroll-what the artist describes as "an everlasting feedback loop of my experience." The wallpaper pays homage to the structural composition of an architectural frieze, a New York City skyline, and the ornate adornment seen on the walls of institutional period rooms. Through this unique presentation of digital collage and sculpture, Irving's ceramic work is juxtaposed with the detailed wallpaper that maps the artist's personal archive of visual culture as culled from his activity on the Internet. From this cache of images, Irving assembles decals-both found and of his own making-and applies them to sculptures and architectural surfaces in a layered compositional process. The immersive display of 24 sculptural, digital, and two-dimensional works expands on Irving's ongoing research into, and practice of, collage and assemblage. Describing his fusion of materials and references, the artist has said, "By refusing to make everything explicitly legible, the work allows there to be space for the ways Black people live . . . for more of the complicated nature of our existence in places and spaces."

Thelma Golden explains, "Like the Internet, a boundless and dynamic space that fuels Kahlil Robert Irving's imagination, the artist's new installation is fascinating and multilayered, and opens path after path for the viewer. The Studio Museum in Harlem is proud to continue its collaboration with MoMA by presenting this extraordinary exhibition, which is as historically probing as it is timely and forward-thinking."

Currently, Irving is presenting a group of new sculptures in the New Museum Triennial Soft Water Hard Stone, co-curated by Jamillah James and Margot Norton. Irving was recently awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. In 2018, Irving's first institutional solo exhibition took place at Wesleyan University's Center.

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