Professor Margaret Laurena Kemp's Performance Art Depicted in Book

Professor Margaret Laurena Kemp is an artist who explores what lies beneath the surface. Her work over a six-year period during a residency at Montalvo's Lucas Artists Program has been chronicled in Kim Yasuda's book Beneath the Surface. 

In Yasuda's book, she writes about Kemp's performance works and soundscapes which explore the exclusion and racialization of Black bodies in public lands. Kemp's work conjures figures through time and space and brings them into the present as hauntings that point to the unsettled past that continues to linger. 

In her 20216 performance Ghosting, Kemp was dressed in a diaphanous antebellum-style white dress as she slowly moved down a apthway around the edge of the Montalvo garden. As she moved, she combined gestures from African American dance traditions illustrating the aesthetics of Black bodies and their historires of movement.