M. LeBlanc is proud to open the gallery's second solo exhibition with artist Arnold J. Kemp. Titled 'Un-make | Un-model', the exhibition will open on Saturday, April 19th from 6 to 9 pm, and remain on view through May 31st. Comprising the exhibition are watercolors from Kemp’s latest Scores series and a select number of recent abstract paintings. .

For the last 30 years, American artist Arnold J. Kemp has committed his practice to the politics of conceptual art. Kemp’s work considers how histories of Black survival might be utterly fragile, necessitating interdependency and mutual aid, and requiring a queer poetics of touch in order to take shape. A multi-hyphenate artist, Kemp’s experiments in art-making take the form of talks, performances, publications, plays, painting, and sculpture. Engaging ideas about the permeability of the border between self and the materials of culture, Kemp’s art holds potential to spur new thinking about the requirements of creativity in a world where all bodies need to engage creatively every single day.

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Kemp's former student Norah Horwitz (1986-2025). 

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 in Rockland, ME, ARNOLD J. KEMP: THREE PLAYS (2024) at Human Resources in Los Angeles, STAGE (2023) at Martos Gallery in New York, Less Like an Object and More Like the Weather (2022) at the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago, FALSE HYDRAS (2021) at JOAN in Los Angeles and I COULD SURVIVE, I WOULD SURVIVE, I SHOULD SURVIVE (2021) at Manetti Shrem Art Museum at the University of California at 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.