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 ‘91), 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, Huey Copland, Ed Roberso