For the last 30 years, American/Bahamian 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.

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.

Arnold J. Kemp (American/Bahamian, 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.

CURRICULUM VITAE

EXHIBITIONS

April 13 - May 24th, 2024
2024 Group Exhibition

March 12th - April 30th, 2022
Talking To The Sun

March 6th - April 17th 2021

SELECT EXHIBTIONS

First Comes Dark Notes
Coulter Art Gallery at Stanford University
October 1st - December 6th, 2024

To Whom Keeps a Record
Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland
May 25th - September 8th, 2024

STAGE
Martos Gallery, New York
November 3 – Saturday, January 14, 2023

Less Like an Object and More Like the Weather
The Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago
February 17th - April 10th, 2022

I Would Survive, I Could Survive, I Should Survive
Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California at Davis
June 3rd - November 12th, 2021

PUBLICATIONS

Arnold J. Kemp | February 14

Arnold J. Kemp | In Arms