The materials employed in Arnold J. Kemp’s interdisciplinary practice absorb or reflect light while mirroring likeness, becoming haunted and ghostly metaphors for absented and obfuscated black bodies. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the Portland Art Museum, among others. Kemp has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the San Francisco Art Institute and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Recent exhibitions include When the “Sick Rules the World” (Biquini Wax, Mexico City), “The Stupidity of Belief” (Iceberg Projects, Chicago) and “The Big Dark” with artist Kristan Kennedy (Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, Ore). Kemp’s work has also been shown recently at the Drawing Center, New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and featured in Nia DaCosta’s film Candyman (Monkeypaw Productions, 2020). Kemp lives and works in Chicago, where he is professor and dean of graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The exhibition “Arnold Joseph Kemp: I would survive. I could survive. I should survive.” will be on view at the Manetti Shrem Museum through April 25, 2021.  

Kemp will give a reading of his poetry, then discuss the relationship between language and the aesthetics presented in his paintings, photographs and sculpture with Manetti Shrem Museum scholar-in-residence Sampada Aranke. 

Organized by the Department of Art and Art History. Co-sponsored by the UC Davis College of Letters and Science and the Manetti Shrem Museum.