The Modern Art Notes Podcast · Tyler Green

Kahlil Robert Irving, Truman Lowe

March 26, 2026·1 hr 5 min·6 clips

Kahlil Robert Irving reveals how the police killing of Michael Brown mirrors the Confederacy's lack of accountability.

1. The Modern Art Notes Podcast host Tyler Green interviews Kahlil Robert Irving about his works in Monuments, an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles curated by Hamza Walker, Kara Walker, and Bennett Simpson. 2. Irving is a St. Louis-based artist with solo exhibitions at MoMA New York, the Walker Art Center, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; his works in Monuments include New Nation States Battle of Manassas-2014 (2024-25) and Viewfinder (2024). 3. The exhibition's thesis is that decommissioned Confederate monuments ('lost cause' monuments) can be juxtaposed with artworks that address the histories those monuments were meant to erase. 4. Irving was invited into the show after a 2022 breakfast meeting with curator Hamza Walker in Los Angeles, arranged through dealer Sean Regan of Regan Projects; the conversation centered on decommissioned monuments. 5. Irving's initial proposal was for a fictional black community that survived Jim Crow and Reconstruction from 1850 to present — composite architectural models of hotels, schools, homes, and hospitals — a project he says is still planned for a proposed 2027-28 exhibition at the Carpenter Center at Harvard. 6. He chose Ferguson, Missouri for his primary Monuments work because the failure to hold police accountable for killing Michael Brown Jr. in 2014 is 'a mirror' of the Confederacy's unaccountability: 'the inability to hold people accountable for their behavior' is the same equation in the 19th and 21st centuries. 7. The sculpture is constructed entirely in digital space — composited from satellite photographs of Ferguson — then printed in wax and cast in bronze, so its digital fabrication mirrors how the events were shared and processed across digital networks. 8. Irving was in Phoenix visiting his mother's family in 2014 when he had to leave because family members said 'very problematic and violent things' about the Ferguson events — the sculpture carries that personal wound. 9. The four-part bronze installation maps specific sites: the Canfield apartment complex where Brown was killed, two stretches of thoroughfare where police met civilians with militarization, and a fourth panel installed in Irving's studio because it was too large for MoCA. 10. Irving deliberately relocated the black granite Dred Scott monument — which actually sits in Calvary Cemetery in North St. Louis — into his Ferguson installation, placing Dred and Harriet Scott's memorials together, since in reality they are buried separately. 11. The installation also includes a representation of Homer G. Phillips Hospital, which trained most Black doctors and nurses through the mid-20th century; Irving's grandmother was a nurse for 50 years and the family discussed Homer G. Phillips throughout his childhood. 12. The arch piece Viewfinder was conceived to be proportionally distanced from the Ferguson sculpture at the actual distance from Ferguson to the Gateway Arch — approximately ten and a half miles — but this proved impractical and the Arch now sits closer, acting as a moniker for the city and for American imperialism. 13. Irving cites a pivotal challenge from his Washington University professor, documentary filmmaker Denise Ward Brown: 'You can make nouns very well — but how do you make a verb?' The question directed him toward implicating the viewer in time, a pursuit that still defines his practice. 14. Irving describes his practice as a 'quadrifold abstraction' — the artwork itself, the moment it references, the experience of seeing it, and the diaristic engagement of viewer or artist — using his experience learning baritone saxophone from Hammett Bluiett of the World Saxophone Quartet as an analogy for making a concert rather than solo work. 15. Green asks whether the Trump administration's actions in 2025 have changed how Irving thinks about the Ferguson works; Irving reflects that the '2014' date in the title may need to change, because if it does the work becomes a monument rather than a relic. 16. In the second segment, curator Rebecca Head Troutman discusses the first career survey of Ho-Chunk artist Truman Lowe — Water's Edge at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, on view through January 2027. 17. Lowe grew up along the Black River in the Ho-Chunk community outside Black River Falls, Wisconsin, playing, swimming, and fishing along its banks, developing a lifelong focus specifically on moving water — rivers, rapids, and waterfalls — not still water. 18. For the 1992 Land Spirit Power exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, a landmark show for Indigenous contemporary artists, Lowe made a monumental river sculpture from slats of wood, visiting Ottawa and studying the confluence of the Ottawa, Rideau, and Gatineau rivers before making it. 19. Lowe answered questions about how to transform solid wood into flowing water with 'the wood is water' — willow trees grow along riverbanks, draw water through their roots and fibers, and when bark is peeled from willow saplings, liquid streams out. 20. Listeners interested in contemporary sculpture, monuments and historical memory, or Indigenous American art will find both segments of the episode directly relevant.

As heard by us

A careful art conversation about monuments, memory, and how an artwork can ask the viewer to act.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast frames Kahlil Robert Irving through Monuments at MOCA Los Angeles, where his work appears beside decommissioned Lost Cause monuments and art that pushes back against the histories those monuments tried to preserve.

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If you want art that pushes back against monuments, memory, and erasure, start here.

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