Arnold Joseph Kemp is currently at work on a solo exhibition for the non-profit art space JOAN in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from Stanford University. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Artadia Fund for Art & Dialogue, Art Matters, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Printed Matter, and the American Academy of Poets. His artworks are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Berkeley Art Museum and the Portland Museum of Art. Kemp is also a writer and he has read in spaces like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as in living rooms in Oakland, and in bars and bookstores in San Francisco, Berkeley, and New York. His writing has appeared in Callaloo, Three Rivers Poetry Journal, Agni Review, MIRAGE #4 Period(ical), River Styx, Nocturnes, Art Journal, and Tripwire and in From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice. Kemp’s critical writing has appeared recently on the legacy of Kynaston McShine in Texte zur Kunst and on Kerry James Marshall and the market’s receptivity to black figuration in Spike Art Magazine. He has shown most recently at Iceberg Projects, Chicago, IL; Biquini Wax, EPS, Mexico City, Mexico; The Drawing Center, New York, and Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland. OR. He has chaired programs and taught at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Virginia Commonwealth University, Ox-bow School of Art and in 2016 at the San Francisco Art Institute where he was a distinguished artist-in-residence and gave the key note address on Kathy Acker, Adrian Piper, and “Fucking James Franco” at the Summer symposium; Stimulus Packages: Politics, Pleasure, Aesthetics. Kemp is currently Professor in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he is also Dean of Graduate Studies.
