Arnold J. Kemp: Not One Thing

Not One Thing is the first survey of the Chicago-based artist Arnold J. Kemp (Tufts University BA/BFA 1991), recognizing the performative and material traditions of masking across media of sculpture, painting, photography, performance and printmaking. Kemp’s works oscillate between revelation and obfuscation, creating enigmatic and poetic bodies of work. Critically, Kemp’s larger practice refuses to use identity as a singular container of meaning, instead grappling with legacies of conceptualism, Black and diasporic experiences, queer relationalities, and modes of being. This exhibition, focusing on the last decade in the artist’s career of more than thirty years, will also feature a new work commissioned by Tufts University Art Galleries. 

Not One Thing presents Kemp’s work in the first, large-scale solo in Boston since his time as a combined degree student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (SMFA at Tufts). Kemp is known for his conceptual use of masks referencing psychological and West African aesthetics. As a first-generation American of immigrant parents from the Caribbean and Central America, Kemp’s work has often been contextualized within the historical and cultural lineages of contemporary identity, materiality, and politics. Since the late 1990s, Kemp has incorporated masks, “doppelgängers, surrogates,” and, as Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times “a whole host of other Arnold Kemps,” in his multidisciplinary practice with equally poignant emphases on absurdity, horror, and play.  

In Not One Thing, masked dualities operate as methodologies for artistic research and modes of being in the world. 

Arnold J. Kemp: Not One Thing is organized by TUAG Curator Laurel V. McLaughlin. 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, Danielle A. Jackson, Eungie Joo, Arnold J. Kemp, Laurel V. McLaughlin, Tausif Noor, Stephanie Snyder, and Lynne Tillman. This groundbreaking reader is edited by Rachel Churner.  

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.