Arnold J. Kemp: Reader Book Launch & Panel

Join Tufts University Art Galleries for the book launch of Arnold J. Kemp: Reader and a panel with the artist and Dr. Pamela Lee, Yale University Carnegie Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, moderated by TUAG curator and co-Interim Director Laurel V. McLaughlin.

Arnold J. Kemp: Reader is co-published by Tufts University Art Galleries and No Place Press, designed by Geoff Kaplan, and edited by Rachel Churner with contributions from Kemi Adeyemi, Sampada Aranke, Gregg Bordowitz, Huey Copland, Danielle A. Jackson, Eungie Joo, Arnold J. Kemp, Kevin Killian, Laurel V. McLaughlin, Tausif Noor, Stephanie Snyder, and Lynne Tillman.

Arnold J. Kemp (American, b. 1968, Boston) lives and works in Chicago. Recent exhibitions of the artist’s work include To Whom Keeps A Record (2024) at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; Arnold J. Kemp: Three Plays (2024), Human Resources, Los Angeles; Stage (2023), Martos Gallery, New York; Less Like an Object and More Like the Weather (2022), The Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago; False Hydras (2021), JOAN, Los Angeles; and I Could Survive, I Would Survive, I Should Survive (2021), Manetti Shrem Art Museum, the University of California, Davis. 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, and the Hammer Art Museum. He has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2021. In addition, Kemp’s writing has appeared in Artforum, October, Art Journal, Texte zur Kunst, Callaloo, Agni Review, MIRAGE #4 Period(ical), River Styx, Nocturnes, Tripwire, Three Rivers Poetry Journal, and in From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice.

Professor Kemp teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2024, he was the Holt Visiting Artist in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. He also holds an MFA (2025) from Stanford University.

Pamela M. Lee teaches the history, theory and criticism of late modernism and contemporary art with research interests in the relationship between aesthetics, politics, war, time, technology and system. Her courses include lectures and seminars on Abstract Expressionism; the art of the 1960s; contemporary art and globalization; feminism; methods and historiography; art and technology; modernism and war; and media cultures of the Cold War.

Professor Lee taught at Stanford University from 1997-2018, where she held the Osgood Hooker Professorship in Fine Arts. She has published six single-authored books including Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (2000); Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (2004); and Forgetting the Art World (2012). Her most recent book is Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, The Cold War and the Neoliberal Present (2020).