Saturday, July 27th | 3-4pm | In-person at CMCA
Please join us at the CMCA on Saturday, July 27th at 3pm, for an in-person conversation with exhibiting artist, Arnold J. Kemp and critic and curator, Bob Nickas. The Summer exhibition, To Whom Keeps a Record features works by 2023 Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Visual Arts Fellow, Arnold J. Kemp. A generous and generative selection that provides a snapshot into an artist’s practice, the exhibition addresses persistent questions concerning artistic research and risk, ethics and politics, self and story. Join us in unpacking the ways in which Kemp’s work creates entrances into ideas and information while suggesting persistence, Black interiority, Black resistance and Black imagination.
About the panelists:
Arnold J. Kemp
Born in Boston, MA to Caribbean parents, Arnold J. Kemp (b. 1968) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose work is at once, poetically lyrical and culturally informed. His work, which emerges from a personal archive, serves as a reminder of today’s socio-political landscape and its reverberations in the Black psyche. Arnold J. Kemp has been concerned with artists, writers, curators and educators working in art spaces founded by and in support of other artists for almost four decades. His artistic work and writing is rooted in research and process, and engages ideas about the permeability of the border between self and the materials of one’s work. His experiments in art making extend beyond the studio and formal gallery system by taking the form of talks, performances, limited-edition artist’s books, collaborations and art objects. For the artist, art production holds potential to spur new thinking about the requirements of creativity in a world where all bodies need to engage creatively every single day. Arnold J. 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, the Hammer Art Museum, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar and The Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection. Recent exhibitions include LESS LIKE AN OBJECT, MORE LIKE THE WEATHER, Neabauer Collegium, University of Chicago; TALKING TO THE SUN, M. LeBlanc, Chicago; STAGE, Martos Gallery, New York; FALSE HYDRAS, JOAN, Los Angeles; and WHEN THE SICK RULE THE WORLD, Biquini Wax, Mexico City.
Bob Nickas
A writer and curator based in New York, Bob Nickas has organized over 125 exhibitions and artist projects since 1984. As Curatorial Advisor at MoMA/P.S.1 in New York between 2004-07, he organized the first American museum retrospectives for Lee Lozano, Peter Hujar, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Tom Sandberg. He served on the teams for the 2003 Biennale de Lyon, Greater New York 2005 at MoMA/PS1, contributed a section to Aperto at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and collaborated with Cady Noland on her installation for Documenta IX in 1992. He was founding editor of Index magazine (1996-2000), with publisher Peter Halley. Among his many books and catalogs are five collections of writing and interviews: Theft Is Vision, Live Free or Die, The Dept. of Corrections, Komplaint Dept., and Corrected Proofs, as well as Yesterworld: 2019 Diary.
Header image: Stage, 2023, Maple plywood. (detail).