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Kahlil Robert Irving Reflects on the Built World in Kemper Exhibition | St. Louis

Published

2 years ago

February 23, 2024

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click to enlarge WHITNEY CURTIS / WASH U Kahlil Robert Irving pauses for a photo in his St. Louis studio.
Humans are strangely fascinated with our own ruins. We gaze upon the artifacts of people who came before us and wonder what life was like for them, our reflections filtered through the lenses of our own lived experiences. In Kahlil Robert Irving’s latest solo exhibition, Archaeology of the Present, the renowned visual artist curates a similar experience, with one major difference: Instead of the ancient past, Irving invites viewers to confront their own epoch.
In the center of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s Ebsworth Gallery stands a 2,500-square-foot plywood platform. A wide set of stairs forms one side of the perimeter, while an Americans with Disabilities Act–compliant ramp lines another — Irving is adamant that “people who navigate space in all ways possible” have access to the experience.
Within the platform lie eight distinct elements — well, some of them lie. Others tower overhead, or perch atop chipwood pedestals at eye level, or sit sunken into the platform itself, enclosed by low railings. The installation resembles an archeological excavation, where the Doric columns of Pompeii give way to a ceramic industrial pipe or fragment of faux-brick wall, while the subterranean gaps reveal not Byzantine mosaics, but stoneware tiles that mimic the asphalt of a city street.
“I’m just reflecting on the built world as an entity, as a place, as a fiction,” Irving says.
“These things tell part of this kind of fragmented story of a space or people or the time,” says Meredith Malone, curator at the Kemper. “I think the whole thing is stunning.”
This is not Irving’s first show at the Kemper. As a graduate student at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Art and Design, Irving’s work, alongside that of 24 classmates, was displayed in the museum’s Ebsworth Gallery as part of its 2017 MFA Thesis Exhibition. His installation featured two large sculptures, a digital Jacquard weaving and three flags — elements that have frequently reappeared in Irving’s subsequent work. In many ways, Irving sees that exhibition, though smaller in scale, as a “precursor” to Archaeology of the Present.
For Irving, the return to Wash U is a cause for celebration, despite his fraught relationship with the Sam Fox School — specifically, with its mostly white faculty.
“A lot of the faculty have their feelings hurt, because they’re all uncomfortable being around me, because they’re afraid of being held accountable for their bad behavior,” says Irving, though he declines to be more specific. “I hope that the exhibition can be as much of a celebration as I’d like it to be. Like, I hope that despite the racist, problematic infrastructure of Washington University’s Sam Fox School, that the faculty can support and appreciate the hard work and determination that I have had to become and be a successful alumni of the University and in the art world.”
Irving’s “successful alumni” status is hardly in question. When the Riverfront Times last spoke to Irving, in 2016, he was still at Wash U. Since then, Irving has participated in exhibitions at the Gagosian Gallery in London, the New Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, to name a few. You can find him in the permanent collections of institutions like the Carnegie Museum of Art, the RISD Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Irving’s creations have traveled as far as the Riga Porcelain Museum in Latvia and the Foundation for Contemporary Ceramic Art in Hungary, and as close to home as the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
Most recently, his work was the subject of the Walker Art Center’s original presentation of Archaeology of the Present in Minneapolis. click to enlarge COURTESY PHOTO VIA THE KEMPER Archeology of the Present was presented in Minneapolis before making its way to St. Louis.
On February 23, Irving will become the first Wash U alum to have a solo exhibition at the Kemper since its current location opened in 2006. The Kemper presentation coincides with a separate exhibition of Irving’s work that opened last week at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, making Kahlil a rare example of an artist “bookending” the state of Missouri.
“He’s always been incredibly ambitious and really thoughtful in the kind of work that he was producing,” says Malone, who curated the 2017 MFA exhibition. “You can see how hard he works and the vastness of his approach to creative making.”
In some ways, Irving’s approach to making is surprisingly straightforward: “I like making shit. I like making weird shit. I like making new shit,” he declares emphatically when I ask him where he draws his inspiration from.
At the same time Irving, who describes himself as a “critical person,” has found in his art a powerful vehicle for self-expression and social commentary.“I’ve always known I had something to say,” Irving says. “Making sculpture and making paintings and making exhibitions has just been one way that has been able to be realized.”In Archeology of the Present, Irving says a lot. The city street “as both place and concept” is central to the exhibition and to the artistic ethos of Irving, who grew up and resides in south St. Louis.
“A lot of his work is grounded in his experiences here, in this city, and this social and environmental context,” says Malone. “He’s always thinking about the city street. He’s thinking about that as a public space, but also a place of violence.”
In one work, Flat Smoke [{my heart is and ain’t heavy}|Can we remember MS Green!], ceramic facsimiles of crumbled newspapers litter a floor of jet-black glazed tiles, evocative of the city street. The publications imitated range from historically Black publications to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York Times. They relay acts of violence, advertise social gatherings or display graphs of COVID-19 mortality rates.
“Each fragment of the installation, each section of the installation, is just a moment: the moment caught in ecstasy, the moment caught in joy, in mourning,” Irving says. “There are references to specific life experiences or symbols that relate to, that open up the dialogue for many people, or open up space for many people to feel seen or recognized in the work.”
The exhibition welcomes all viewers to reflect on these moments, but not every viewer will feel “seen” in the same way.
“The installation is just the presence of a series of optics to imbue or engage with ideologies,” Irving says. “There’s a bridge that has to be built to address that. To approach that bridge, you already have to be doing the work of dealing with your relationship to white supremacy and violence.”
The Kemper’s presentation of Archaeology of the Present will introduce five new works from Irving, including a flag and a four-part painting — a relatively new medium for him. In tandem with the exhibition, the Kemper Museum Video Gallery will screen seven short films selected by Irving, many of which were created by former fellow MFAs or local St. Louis artists.
“He’s very much interested in bringing people along with him too,” Malone says.
Archeology of the Present opens February 23 and will run through July 29. For more information, visit the Kemper Art Museum’s website.

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Five Fun Facts About Busch Stadium You Didn’t Know

Published

1 year ago

July 30, 2024

Natural Bridge

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When baseball fans roll into St. Louis, Busch Stadium often tops their must-see list. But this iconic ballpark has more hidden gems beyond baseball — and even beyond its souvenir shops and good hotdogs. Here’s a lineup of interesting facts that’ll make you the MVP in Busch Stadium trivia.

From Ballpark to Brewing Brand Deal

A 1900 postcard showing the Oyster House of Tony Faust, founder of the brewing firm | Courtesy Anheuser-Busch.

Busch Stadium has a past that’s more refreshing than a cold beer. Before becoming the shrine of Cardinals baseball, it was a multipurpose park called Sportsman”s Park in 1953. Anheuser-Busch, the brewing giant that owned the Cardinals for a time, purchased the stadium and called it Busch Stadium.

Talk about brewing a partnership with a home run!

Museum for Baseball Maniacs

One can explore unique stadium models, step into the broadcast booth to relive Cardinals’ historic moments and hold authentic bats from team legends in this Museum | Courtesy Cardinals Nation

The St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame and Museum is an 8,000-square-foot tribute to baseball’s rich history. Opening on the Cardinals’ 2014 Opening Day, this shrine charts the team’s stories from its 1882 beginnings when it was still called the American Association Browns. Here, you can revel in the team’s 11 World Series Championships and 19 pennants. And if you’re feeling adventurous, watch the game from the museum’s roof—the Hoffmann Brothers Rooftop—complete with a full-service bar and an all-you-can-eat menu. It’s like VIP seating, but with more hot dogs.

Even the Fans Break World Records

Busch Stadium is more than a ballpark; it’s a record-breaking arena.

In one memorable event, Nathan’s Famous set a Guinness World Record for the most selfies taken simultaneously—4,296, to be exact. Just imagine trying to squeeze all those selfies into a single frame!

Not to be outdone, Edward Jones and the Alzheimer’s Association formed the largest human image of a brain on the field in 2018. With 1,202 people, the image was like a giant, multi-colored brain freeze.

1,202 people gathered in centerfield at Busch Stadium to form a multi-coloured brain image | Screenshot from Guinness World Records.

The MLB Park in Your Backyard

Are you an avid Cardinals fan, thinking about living near the stadium? The cost of living in the area might be in your favor.

A 2017 study by Estately.com shows that media prices for homes around Busch Stadium is the fourth least expensive among around 26 major MLB stadiums. When San Francisco Giants fans have to pay up $1,197,000 that year for the same convenience of catching a game at a walking distance, Cardinal fans can snag real estate at only $184,900. If that’s not a walk-off win of a deal, we’re not sure what is.

Big Cleats to Fill as Busch Stadium Eyes Expansion

Those wanting to invest in property near Busch Stadium better get it while it’s still affordable. Rumor has it Busch Stadium could soon expand. That rumor has been going around for three decades since talks to raise public money allegedly started. We’ll believe it when we see it.

According to Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt III, plans are likely to mirror recent projects for the Milwaukee Brewers and Baltimore Orioles, with price tags hovering around $500 to $600 million. But the real investment is still up for debates pending a concrete cost-benefit analysis on the stadium’s surrounding area.

So the next time you kick back with a cold beer and catch a game at Busch Stadium, be in awe of the fact there’s more to the place than what meets the batter’s eye. Pitch these interesting facts at trivia night or to your Hinge date who’s new in town. Who knows – you might just win a home run beer.

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Nashville Police Officer Arrested for Appearing in Adult Video

Published

1 year ago

June 14, 2024

Natural Bridge

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A Nashville police officer, Sean Herman, 33, has been arrested and charged with two counts of felony official misconduct after allegedly appearing in an adult video on OnlyFans while on duty. Herman was fired one day after detectives became aware of the video last month.

The video, titled “Can’t believe he didn’t arrest me,” shows Herman, participating in a mock traffic stop while in uniform, groping a woman’s breasts, and grabbing his genitals through his pants. The officer’s face is not visible, but his cruiser, patrol car, and Metro Nashville Police Department patch on his shoulder are clearly visible.

The Metro Nashville Police Department launched an investigation immediately upon discovering the video. The internal investigation determined Herman to be the officer appearing in the video. He was fired on May 9 and arrested on June 14, with a bond set at $3,000.

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Jane Smiley’s New Novel, Lucky, Draws on Her Charmed St. Louis Childhood

Published

1 year ago

May 22, 2024

Natural Bridge

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Like any good St. Louisan, Jane Smiley has an opinion on the high school question.

“If you ask somebody in St. Louis, ‘Where did you go to high school’ — because each school is so unique, you do get a sense of what their life was like and where they live,” says the John Burroughs graduate. “Where are you from? What do you like? And, you know, the answer is always interesting.”

That’s pretty much what Jodie Rattler, the main character of Smiley’s latest novel, Lucky, thinks.

“School, in St. Louis, is a big question, especially high school,” Rattler muses toward the start of the story. “… My theory about this is not that the person who asks wants to judge you for your socioeconomic position, rather that he or she wants to imagine your neighborhood, since there are so many, and they are all different.”

This parallel thought pattern is even less of a coincidence than the author/subject relationship implies. Lucky, which Alfred A. Knopf published last month, is nominally the story of Jodie, a folk musician gone fairly big who hails from our fair town. But the book is more than just its plot: It’s an ode to St. Louis and an exploration of the life Jane Smiley might have lived — if only a few things were different.

The trail to Lucky started in 2019, when Smiley returned here for her 50th high school reunion and agreed to a local interview. The radio host asked why she’d never set a novel in St. Louis.

“I thought, ‘Boy, why haven’t I done that?'” Smiley remembers. “And so then I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should think about it.’ And I decided since I love music, and St. Louis is a great music town, that I would maybe do an alternative biography of myself if I had been a musician, and of course I would say where she went to [high] school. So that’s what got me started. And the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it.” click to enlarge DEREK SHAPTON Jane Smiley rocketed to literary stardom after winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for A Thousand Acres. She now has more than 25 books to her name.

The Life Jane Smiley Didn’t Live

Jane Smiley has always felt really lucky.

First, there was her background: She grew up with a “very easygoing and fun family.” Growing up in Webster Groves, she enjoyed wandering through the adjacent neighborhoods and exploring how spaces that were so close together could have such different vibes.

Then there was her career, which kicked into gear when she was 42 with the publication of A Thousand Acres, a retelling of King Lear set on a farm in Iowa. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1991 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992. It became a movie and, two years ago, an opera. Since then, she’s been steadily publishing and now has more than 25 books to her name.

“I was lucky in the way that my career got started,” Smiley says. “It was lucky in a way that it continued. I was lucky to win the Pulitzer. And I really enjoyed that. I said, ‘OK, I want to write about someone who’s lucky, but I don’t want it to be me. Because I want to contemplate the idea of luck, and see how maybe it works for somebody else.'”

click to enlarge

Both the book, and Jodie’s good luck, start at Cahokia Downs in 1955. Jodie’s Uncle Drew, a father stand-in, takes her to the racetrack and has her select the numbers on a bet that turns his last $6 into $5,986. She gets $86 of the winnings in a roll of $2 bills.

Smiley, a horse lover throughout her life, used to love looking at the horses at the racetrack before she understood how “corrupt it is at work.” (She also reminisces about pony rides at the corner of Brentwood and Manchester across from St. Mary Magdalen Church and riding her horse at Otis Brown Stables.)

Unlike Smiley, Jodie is not a horse person. And at first, Jodie feels somewhat disconnected from her luck — it’s something other people tell her that she possesses. She’s lucky to live where she does. She’s lucky that her mom doesn’t make her clear her plate, that her uncle has a big house, that she gets into John Burroughs. Later, she begins to carry those bills around as a talisman.

“[I] made a vow never to spend that roll of two-dollar bills — that was where the luck lived,” Jodie thinks after a narrow miss with a tornado.

It’s John Burroughs that changes Jodie’s life, just as it did Smiley’s. But instead of falling in love with books in high school and becoming a writer, Jodie falls into music. She eventually gets into songwriting, penning tunes as a sophomore at Penn State that launch her career.

One of Jodie’s songs should instantly resonate for St. Louis readers.

“The third one was about an accident I heard had happened in St. Louis,” Jodie recalls in the book, “a car going off the bridge over the River des Peres, which may have once been a river but was now a sewer. My challenge was to make sense of the story while sticking in a bunch of odd St. Louis street names — Skinker, of course, DeBaliviere, Bompart, Chouteau, Vandeventer. The chorus was about Big Bend. The song made me cry, but I never sang it to anyone but myself.”

Throughout the book are Jodie’s lyrics, alongside the events that inspire them. Writing them was a new experience for Smiley, who found herself picking up a banjo gifted by an ex and strumming the few songs she’d managed to learn, as well as revisiting the popular music of the novel’s time — the Beatles (George is Smiley’s favorite), Janis Joplin and the Traveling Wilburys, along with Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Peter, Paul and Mary — basically “all the folk singers.”

“I really love music, and I do wish I’d managed to practice, which I was always a failure at,” Smiley says. “… I liked that they made up their own lyrics, and they made their own music, and I was impressed by that.”

Both Smiley and Jodie grew up in households replete with record players and music. It’s one of their great commonalities.

A great difference between the two? That would be sex. At one point, Jodie compares her body count, which she calls the “Jodie Club,” with a lover — 25 (rounded up, Jodie notes) to his 150.

“That was a lot of fun,” says Smiley. “She learns a lot from having those affairs, and she enjoys it. She’s careful. And I like the fact that she never gets married, and she doesn’t really have any regrets about that.” (Smiley has been married four times.) “In some sense, her musical career has made her want to explore those kinds of issues of love and connection and sex and the way guys are.”

You can tell Smiley had a good time writing this. After Jodie loses her virginity, she thinks, “The erection had turned into a rather cute thing that flopped to one side.”

“Oh, it was fun,” Smiley confirms. “Sometimes I would say, ‘OK, what can I have Jodie do next? What’s something completely different than what I did when I was her age?’ And then I’d have to think about that and try and come up with something that was actually interesting. I knew that she couldn’t do all the things that I had done, and she had to be kind of a different person than I was. And so I made her a little more independent, and a little more determined.”

click to enlarge VIA THE SCHOOL YEARBOOK Jane Smiley’s high school yearbook photo. In Lucky, Jodie recalls of a classmate, “The gawky girl had stuck her head into a basketball basket, taken hold of the rim, and her caption was, ‘They always have the tall girls guard the basket.'”

Lucky follows Jodie from childhood to into her late 60s. At several points in the novel, she crosses paths with a Burroughs classmate, identified only as the “gawky girl.” Jodie takes note of her former classmate, but she’s not recognized.

Toward the end, Jodie walks into Left Bank Books and sees the gawky girl’s name on the cover of a novel.

“Out of curiosity, I read a few things about the gawky girl. Apparently she really had been to Greenland, and the Pulitzer novel was based on King Lear, which I thought was weird, but I did remember that when we read King Lear in senior English, I hadn’t liked it,” Jodie thinks. “… I remembered walking past her in the front hall of the school, maybe a ways down from the front door. She was standing there smiling, her glasses sliding down her nose, and one of the guys in our class, one of the outgoing ones, not one of the math nerds that abounded, stopped and looked at her, and said, ‘You know, I would date you if you weren’t so tall.'”

Sound familiar? Does it help to know Smiley is 6’2″?

The doppelgangers meet face to face after their 50th Burroughs’ reunion at the Fox and Hounds bar at the Cheshire. To go into what happens next — it’s too much of a spoiler.

“In every book, there’s always a surprise,” Smiley says. click to enlarge ZACHARY LINHARES Smiley enjoys St. Louis place names, and DeBaliviere is one of many in the novel.

Jodie Rattler’s St. Louis

Lucky is a smorgasbord of familiar names and places for St. Louis readers, and picking them out will be a big part of the joy of the book for locals.

“I love many things about St. Louis — not exactly the humidity, but lots of other things,” Smiley says. “One of the things I love is how weird the street names are. So I had to put her in that house on Skinker, and I had to refer to a few other places that are kind of weird. I couldn’t fit them all in.

“But I love the way that those street names and St. Louis are a real mix, and some of them are true French street names. Some of them are true English street names. Like Grav-wah or Grav-whoy” — here she deploys first the French and then the St. Louis version of “Gravois” — “whatever you want to call it, and Clark. It’s just really interesting to look around there and sense all of the different cultures that lived there and went through there.”

Jodie grows up in a house on Skinker near Big Bend. It’s “a pale golden color, with the tile roof and the little balcony,” Smiley writes. Jodie walks through Forest Park and eats at Schneithorst’s. Her mother works at the Muny; she shops at Famous Barr. Her grandfather prefers the “golf course near our house on Skinker,” which must be the Forest Park course. Jodie goes to Cardinals games, the Saint Louis Zoo and Grant’s Farm. She visits and thinks about St. Louis’ parks such as Tilles and Babler. Even the county jail in Clayton gets a mention.

Of course, Chuck Berry shows up several times, first mentioned for getting “in trouble for doing something that I wouldn’t understand.” Later, as Jodie drives by his home, she drops some shade on the county along the way: “Aunt Louise knew where Phyllis Schlafly’s house was, so I drove past there — another reason not to choose Ladue,” she writes.

Jodie and the man who invented rock & roll later meet face-to-face briefly at a festival near San Jose, California. “My favorite parts were getting to walk up to Chuck Berry and say, ‘I’m from St. Louis, too. Skinker!’ and having him reply, ‘Cards, baby!’ and know that no one nearby knew what in the world we were talking about,” Jodie recalls.

Lucky feels like a bit of a members-only club, and here the club is St. Louis. There is barely a page that is without some kind of reference — to the point where one might wonder if non-locals can even keep up. (Though they should rest assured: It’s a good read.)

“I write more or less to do what I want to do, and so I wrote about the things that interested me,” Smiley says. And more than 50 years after she graduated high school and left Webster Groves for Iowa and (briefly) Iceland and California, where she lives today, St. Louis, clearly, qualifies.

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