“Arnold J. Kemp: Not One Thing” Community Reception

Join us at TUAG / Medford to celebrate Arnold J. Kemp: Not One Thing, the first institutional survey of work by the Chicago-based artist (b. 1968, Boston).

The exhibition focuses on Kemp’s performative and material traditions of masking, traced throughout his sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography, and plays. Critically, the artist refuses the singularity of essentialized identities, instead grappling with legacies of conceptualism, Black and diasporic experiences, queer relationalities, and resistive modes of being.

Arnold J. Kemp: Not One Thing  is organized by Interim co-Director and Chief Curator Laurel V. McLaughlin with research support from TUAG Curatorial Interns Avery Davis (BA/BFA ’26), Jordan Hoban (MFA ’27), and Rylan Nguyen (BA/BFA ’26).

Arnold J. Kemp (American, b. 1968 in Boston) lives and works in Chicago. Recent exhibitions of the artist’s work include To Whom Keeps A Record (2024) at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; Arnold J. Kemp: Three Plays (2024), Human Resources, Los Angeles; Stage (2023), Martos Gallery, New York; Less Like an Object and More Like the Weather (2022), The Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago; False Hydras (2021), JOAN, Los Angeles; and I Could Survive, I Would Survive, I Should Survive (2021), Manetti Shrem Art Museum, the University of California, Davis. Kemp’s works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Portland Art Museum, the Schneider Museum of Art, the Tacoma Art Museum, The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, and the Hammer Art Museum. He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2021.

Professor Kemp teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2024, he was the Holt Visiting Artist in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. He also holds an MFA (2025) from Stanford University.

Image: Installation view, Less Like an Object and More Like the Weather, Neubauer Collegium for Culture & Society, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, February 17–April 11, 2022.