Arnold J. Kemp: Artist Lecture

Join Tufts University Art Galleries and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts MFA Program for an artist lecture with Fall 2026 exhibiting artist Arnold J. Kemp. Arnold J. Kemp will reprise a 2023 performance lecture he developed after his first encounter with N. H. Pritchard’s poems in the Johnson Publishing Library, Chicago. Kemp will bring together recent scholarship and dynamic performance in honor of Pritchard’s innovative approach to poetry, sound, and visual art.

Norman Henry Pritchard (b. 1939, Manhattan, New York; d. 1996, Pennsylvania) was one of the most formally innovative poets of the 1960s and early 1970s. Affiliated with downtown literary and art circles, he was a member of Umbra, a collective of Black writers and musicians on the Lower East Side, and a regular at Greenwich Village’s Cedar Tavern. Pritchard published two collections of poetry in his lifetime (The Matrix, Poems: 1960–1970 (Doubleday, 1970), and Eecchhooeess (New York University Press, 1971), which were both reissued in 2021 by Primary Information & Ugly Duckling Presse and DABA, respectively, and one posthumous novel, The Mundus, released in 2024 by Primary Information.

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.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Collective Futures Fund