M. LeBlanc is proud to present Un-make | Un-model, Chicago artist Arnold J. Kemp’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Arnold J. Kemp (American/Bahamian, b. 1968 in Boston) lives and works in Chicago. Kemp works in the expanded field of painting and sculpture to explore identity, stereo-types, and the redefinition of Blackness in today’s contemporary world. Masks, doppelgangers, and surrogates feature frequently in Kemp’s practice, indexing the permeable border between the self and culture. Recent exhibitions of the artist’s work include To Whom Keeps A Record (2024) at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, ME, STAGE (2023) at Martos Gallery in New York, TALKING TO THE SUN (2022) at M. LeBlanc, Less Like an Object and More Like the Weather (2022) at Neubauer Collegium at the University Of Chicago, and I COULD SURVIVE, I WOULD SURVIVE, I SHOULD SURVIVE (2021) at Manetti Shrem Art Museum at the University of California at Davis. Over the past decade, Kemp received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. In addition, Kemp’s practice has been reviewed at length in notable art publications and newspapers, including ArtForum (2021) and The New York Times (2021). 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, and the Tacoma Art Museum.