Arnold J. Kemp: Not One Thing

Arnold J. Kemp: Not One Thing is the first institutional survey of work by the Chicago-based artist Arnold J. Kemp (b. 1968, Boston). The exhibition focuses on Kemp’s performative and material traditions of masking, traced throughout his sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography, and plays. Since the late 1990s, Kemp has created art objects that reference dualisms and multiplicities in the psyche, relating often to Blackness and the profound influence of West African aesthetics on modernism. Building upon his use of masks, doppelgängers, and surrogates, the artist makes many Arnold Kemps emerge with equally poignant emphases on beauty, horror, and play. Kemp’s masks are not only about obfuscation. His layered works also conjure enigmatic and poetic reflections on ways of being and ideas of consciousness. A first-generation American with immigrant parents from the Bahamas and Panama, his larger practice has often been contextualized within historical and cultural lineages of contemporary identity politics. 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.

Not One Thing boldly asserts and simultaneously invites deeper contemplation of such polyvocality in Kemp’s first Boston exhibition since his time as a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University (BA/BFA ’91). The survey includes a new sculptural commission and an evening of performances featuring Kemp’s theatrical works.  

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). The exhibition aligns with the 150th Anniversary Celebration of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. The exhibition is accompanied by Arnold J. Kemp: A Reader, co-published by Tufts University Art Galleries and No Place Press and designed by Geoff Kaplan with contributions from Kemi Adeyemi, Sampada Aranke, Gregg Bordowitz, Huey Copland, Ed Roberson, Eungie Joo, Arnold J. Kemp, Kevin Killian, Laurel V. McLaughlin, Tausif Noor, Stephanie Snyder, and Lynne Tillman.

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. In addition, Kemp’s writing has appeared in Artforum, October, Art Journal, Texte zur Kunst, Callaloo, Agni Review, MIRAGE #4 Period(ical), River Styx, Nocturnes, Tripwire, Three Rivers Poetry Journal, and in From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice. 

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: Arnold J. Kemp, Mr. Kemp: Yellowing, Drying, Scorching, 2020. Courtesy the artist.