Kahlil Robert Irving crafts intricately layered ceramic sculptures that resemble aggregated fragments of everyday objects. In this conversation, Irving discusses his Midwest upbringing, his relationship to monumentality, and the process of building out his studio.

Jessica Gomez Ferrer: How has growing up in the Midwest, in St. Louis specifically, informed your practice?

Kahlil Robert Irving: The majority of my life has been spent between St. Louis and Kansas City. I have lived abroad or done a stint, like a year or year and a half somewhere else, but mostly it's just been the Midwest. So its influence ranges in terms of my family moving from Mississippi or Arkansas to move north more into the Midwest, and the work ethic, the history, the social and cultural framework, how I see the world and how I work together with that foundation. My older relatives were enslaved, and then my great-grandparents moved and had their kids, and then I came into the world. The world has changed quite a bit, but I feel like the Midwest, specifically St. Louis, still has vestiges of the past that aren't rectified.

And I think some of my practice over the last several years, the desire and the aim, the goal and the hope is to try to make room for some of those things to be thought about, not necessarily rectified, but be represented. Honoring legacy and history, but also remembering that the structure of the world in which we inherit still has problems.

Jessica: How did you first come to ceramics and what keeps you returning to it even as your practice expands into different media?

Kahlil: Well, I've been making ceramics since I was twelve. It's been twenty-one years now, making things out of clay. I came to it as a weekend activity and something to do. It was just one of the many things I was doing as a kid. I took it very seriously. I also played saxophone and that was very serious, but not as serious. I was a volunteer at the YMCA and I volunteered at the farmer's market as a kid. Growing up, my grandmother worked as a nurse, and for the last twenty years of her career, she was a neonatal intensive care unit nurse. And when I think about my grandma's job, it was to help sustain and bring life into the world in a way that was safe and secure.

When I think about my practice, it's also about catalyzing things into existence by my labor and by my hand, and trying to sustain them, because ceramics are fragile. It too is a kind of stewardship, not akin to a life, but it has its own physicality. I'm constantly overwhelmed by the material's transformation, and I keep returning to it because there's so much room for invention. There's so much that one can be wowed by in relation to its invention or its material properties. Ceramics can look like a pot, it can look like a rock, and it can look like something from life. And the fact that it has this illusionistic malleability, the aha or the joy of opening the kiln never gets old.

Jessica: You mentioned playing saxophone. I'm curious, is music an important influence on your work?

Kahlil: When I think about music, I don't play saxophone any longer, but I was always excitedly overwhelmed when I sat in the band and everybody around me was playing. I sang in a few choirs growing up, too. You sit with a few hundred people onstage and you hear everyone else's voice from the auditorium. And if you just sit in that, I see that kind of auditory experience similar to the gaps that I was mentioning before. And when I think about collage and how images and objects interplay or have to be dealt with in these sculptures that I've been making over the last ten years, their goal is trying to sit in that interstitial space as well.

Jessica: What's your relationship to monumentality?

Kahlil: I live in St. Louis, and I grew up looking at a 630-foot tall stainless steel arch. This structure was designed in the mid-century by Eero Saarinen, one of the most important designers of the 20th century. My grandma recently passed away so I've been thinking about moving through space as a kid with her: how big things were, how vast things were, how voluminous things were, like the underground tunnels for the public transit, or the buses, and how you got up onto the public transit bus with the sounds and the understanding of your relationship to scale with these things that are larger than you are.

And when I engage things in my studio now, it just goes back to memory and how something is desiring to hold a reference, but the reference may be too psychological for something to actually hold it, whatever it may be. So monumentality is multifaceted because there's an emotional capacity and there's a physical capacity. And when you have a certain perspective, the monument or the thing that is of a certain stature has a certain frame that you have to contend with. And how do I relate or not relate to that architecture? I don't mean architecture of the building, but the architecture of the understanding of what the thing is in which you're engaging. 

One thing that I've been thinking about lately is the sky and the ground. The ground — or I should say sidewalks, asphalt, and the streets, more specifically — is an engineered site that is constantly changing, allowing us to get from place to place. The ground as the crust of the earth is something that has an architectural frame that is too large for us to understand in terms of our personal being. We can get on a plane and travel from one place to another, but we still won't get to its full breadth. We will still never have a full breadth of the understanding of the limits or the limitlessness of the ground. And I see that similarly, thinking about the sky as a psychological, spiritual, cultural space, but also a physical space. The sky around the globe does have a limit, but our personal capacity will never engage the limit of the sky. It is both the ground and the sky. They have a monumentality to them.

Jessica:  And what has it been like for you to build out your studio space?

Kahlil: Hard, because it's expensive. My studio in St. Louis is 13,000 square feet. I have multiple rooms, multiple kilns. I have a large printing press and sometimes I think about moving from here to another place. The studio houses my about 150-piece art collection ranging from works by artists like Mike Cloud and Miyoko Ito to Pope.L and Kerry James Marshall. It ranges from works on paper to sculpture. It's been a blessing to have this space to be able to amass these objects to live with and think about and be around. But building out the studio, I'm realizing that it is a process and it is a part of a practice of thinking about what's most important at any given moment. I have to pay attention to a balance between what needs to be built out or what needs to be updated with time and money, and is this more important than working on this project right now? It’s a balance of sacrifice and practicality.

Jessica: I didn't realize that you had your collection in that studio building with you. That's really special. What has that kind of proximity to other folks' work enabled for you?

Kahlil: Well, it's kind of going back to that earlier comment about legacy and monumentality. I started buying art because I have just been exhausted by institutional opportunities being funded by rich people and collectors. I wanted to buy works of art that I felt good about being around, and that allowed for me to have agency around giving artwork to museums and institutions in honor of my grandmother. Someone who isn't a multimillionaire is able to also live around examples of important artworks by artists that have made a difference or made very important objects that make a difference to people who see them. It's a multi-faceted situation.

Jessica: To close, what has the USA Fellowship afforded you?

Kahlil: It's afforded me to keep my lights on. With the studio, at first, I didn't realize what I took on. In 2021 I bought my studio and I was awarded the Joan Mitchell Fellowship for Painters and Sculptors. I got the Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant the year before, and being acknowledged for seven years for the USA Fellowship and having all these amazing people think that I'm worth being nominated and an awardee of this opportunity has been a real blessing to constantly remember, because there are always people watching. 

What has the Fellowship afforded me? It's afforded a deeper relationship with a colleague named Christopher Harris who won the award in Film. He is also from St. Louis, so there's a deepened connection of camaraderie between us. We did a talk at the Walker Art Center on the occasion of my exhibition, Archaeology of the Present, and the film curator decided to present one of Christopher's films at the end of the run of my exhibition. He and I had the opportunity to have a conversation on stage about his work and my work, and St. Louis and our relationship to the city.

The convening is also something that I have been really looking forward to. There's a stronger sense of community and commitment than many other fellowships that I've received in the past; USA affords the people who are awarded the opportunity to be a part of the larger community. So what it has afforded me is the opportunity to see myself in relationship to the larger group of community members that are in and around the fellowship. I mean, it’s the true sense of the word fellowship.