"Arnold J. Kemp: Not One Thing" Opening Celebration + Tour

Join us for the opening celebration of Arnold J. Kemp: Not One Thing with a public tour with Arnold J. Kemp and Tufts University Fletcher Professor of English Literature Lee Edelman, followed by a community-wide celebration.

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. The survey 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.

Arnold J. Kemp (American, b. 1968, 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.Lee Edelman began his academic career as a scholar of twentieth-century American poetry. He has since become a central figure in the development, dissemination, and rethinking of queer theory. His current work explores the intersections of sexuality, rhetorical theory, cultural politics, and film. He holds an appointment as the Fletcher Professor of English Literature.

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