Join us for a dialogue between Kahlil Robert Irving, the artist behind AnticKS & MOdels + My theater to your eyes, and Dia curator Jordan Carter. If you’d like to watch this talk live online, RSVP to receive livestreaming link. A reception at the Nerman Museum Atrium will follow the in-person talk.

Kahlil Robert Irving was born in San Diego, in 1992. He currently lives and works in St. Louis. He attended the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art, Washington University in St. Louis (MFA Fellow, 2017) and the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA, Art History and Ceramics, 2015). He was an Artist in Residence at Art Omi in summer 2018. He was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award in 2019, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2020, and the inaugural Cultured magazine Young Artists Prize in 2023.

Irving’s past solo exhibitions have taken place at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, Conn.; the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), N.Y.; and the Walker Art Center, Minn. He has also participated in Social Works II at Gagosian Gallery in London; the Singapore Biennale, Singapore Soft Water Hard Stone; The New Museum Triennial; and Making Knowing at the Whitney Museum of Art. This year, Irving has two simultaneous solo exhibitions at major institutions: the Nerman Museum, representing the Kansas City metro region and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis.

Jordan Carter is a curator at the Dia Art Foundation, a New York-based organization known for its prized collection of Minimalist and conceptual art. Previously, Carter was Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 2015–17, he was a Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center. Before his time at the Walker, Carter was Fluxus Collection Intern at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), N.Y. Carter has also held curatorial and research positions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Centre Pompidou in Paris. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, Providence, R.I., and a master’s degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where he focused on Fluxus and global conceptual art.

AnticKS & MOdels + My theater to your eyes: Kahlil Robert Irving will be on view in the Nerman Museum's Oppenheimer, Thompson and Anonymous galleries February 9 through July 7, 2024. This exhibition, sponsored by the Lighton Fund, marks the artist's first institutional solo exhibition in Kansas and a return to the central Midwest.

This program is sponsored by the African American Artists Collective, KC.