Join artist Kahlil Robert Irving and poet Simone White for a conversation moderated by scholar André Brock as they unpack the ways images and sounds circulate and accumulate as digital collages in the public space of the internet. Their conversation will explore the intersections of blackness, technology, language, music, and poetry. This event takes place in conjunction with the exhibition Projects: Kahlil Robert Irving.  

This event is free, open to all, and takes place over Zoom. 

Kahlil Robert Irving in Conversation with André Brock and Simone White is presented in collaboration with MoMA.  

KRI in conversation participant bios

Speaker Bios:

Kahlil Robert Irving is an artist living and working in the US. He attended the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art, Washington University, in St. Louis (MFA), and the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA). His work has been exhibited at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island, among others. Irving presented a group of new sculptures in the New Museum 2021 Triennial, Soft Water Hard Stone. In 2018, Irving’s first institutional solo exhibition took place at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts. He is currently presenting a large-scale commission in the lobby of the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH. Irving’s work is also featured in the exhibitions Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 and Nothing Is So Humble: Prints from Everyday Objects at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art; the RISD Museum; the Carnegie Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Simone White is the author of or, on being the other woman (forthcoming, Duke University Press, 2022), Dear Angel of Death (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem, 2016), House Envy of All the World (Factory School, 2010), the poetry chapbook, Unrest (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), and the collaborative poem/painting chapbook Dolly (with Kim Thomas) (Q Ave, 2008). Her honors include a 2021 Creative Capital Award, a 2017 Whiting Award in Poetry, Cave Canem Foundation fellowships, and recognition as a New American Poet for the Poetry Society of America in 2013. She is the Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Brooklyn. 

André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture, Black technoculture, and digital media. His scholarship examines Black and white representations in social media, video games, weblogs, and other digital media. He has also published influential research on digital research methods. His award-winning book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (NYU Press, 2020), theorizes Black everyday lives mediated by networked digital technologies. 

KRI in conversation resources

“Something Beautiful Waiting There for You: A Conversation with Kahlil Robert Irving,” Interview with Kahil Robert Irving, Legacy Russell, and Thelma Golden,

Studio 

Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),”

South Atlantic Quarterly

Jared Sexton, “Ante-Anti-Blackness,"

Lateral

Simone White, “Fold Crease Wrinkle,” from Dear Angel of Death, reproduced in “The Whiteness Issue,”

by The Racial Imaginary Institute  

Mining the Museum, an exhibition curated and installed by Fred Wilson

KRI Credits and Accessibility

Accessibility  

This program will have American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and live CART captioning. For accessibility questions or accommodation requests please email [email protected] or call (212) 708-9781. 

Volkswagen of America is proud to be MoMA’s lead partner of education. 

Generous support for Adult and Academic Programs is provided by the Agnes Gund Education Endowment Fund for Public Programs, The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art Endowment for Educational Programs, and the Jeanne Thayer Young Scholars Fund. Additional support is provided by the Annual Education Fund.  

The Studio Museum in Harlem’s digital programming is made possible thanks to funding from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation’s Frankenthaler Digital Initiative.