In recent years, the work of St. Louis-based artist Kahlil Robert Irving has focused on the built environment, and more specifically the public space of the city street. Often working with ceramics, a material associated with “real life” utilitarianism, and employing multiple layers of images that become embedded assemblages, Irving considers the infrastructure of daily life and how this infrastructure shapes every aspect of being, from social encounters to surveillance. As he remarks, “For me, the ground is this infinite frame by which narratives and stories are told or understood or traversed . . . objects embedded in the asphalt hold stories that aren’t getting told, they’re just getting built over and on top of.” For Irving, the street is both a public arena for collective gathering that is crucial to the history of Black life, and a site of transition between safety and danger. His work traces instances of anti-Blackness—racism, discrimination, segregation, police violence—that often linger unseen in the urban landscape.

In New Nation (States) Battle of Manassas – 2014, Irving combines thousands of images of St. Louis County culled from online searches and uses video game technology and photogrammetry software to model the overlapping images into three-dimensional form . Cast in bronze, these three tabletop sculptures represent an urban topography, extending Irving’s ongoing interest in transforming images into objects, while collapsing different geographies, temporalities, and historical events. The sculptural installation spans the everyday—billboards, gas stations, and hospitals—while commemorating real and imagined spaces where Black people have been subject to violence. The date in the title, 2014, refers to the year that Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking civil unrest and planting the seeds for dialogues about systemic change in the United States. While the title references Ferguson, in the work itself street signs are blurred, a nod to the recurring nature of these events across the country.

Irving’s title also references the first battle of the Civil War, known in the Union as the First Battle of Bull Run and by Confederates as the Battle of First Manassas, an event that gave Confederate General Thomas J. Jackson his “Stonewall” nickname. Irving links this battle to present-day Black citizen struggles against militarized police, implying that the battle for freedom that began with the Civil War is ongoing.