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 tendencies of masking, traced through his sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography, and plays from the last decade. 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 combined-degree 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 experimentally composed 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.