Language and Improvisation: Arnold J. Kemp & Mira Dayal in Conversation

Join Tufts University Art Galleries and Triple Canopy for a dialogue between artist and School of the Art Institute of Chicago Professor Arnold J. Kemp and artist and Triple Canopy Senior Editor Mira Dayal. Kemp and Dayal will discuss how they work with language in their writing and visual practices, paying particular attention to the materiality, legibility, and production of text. Ahead of Kemp’s series of performances at the galleries, the pair will also consider how Kemp approaches contingencies—the theme of Triple Canopy’s next issue—across his visual art, writing and performances.

Mira Dayal is an artist, writer, and editor based in Brooklyn. She produces sculptures, drawings, installations, books, and interdisciplinary works that create and iterate larger systems of meaning. Dayal is currently Senior Editor at Triple Canopy and recently coedited Track changes: a handbook for art criticism (Paper Monument, 2023). Dayal has contributed more than a hundred features, interviews, exhibition reviews, and other texts to magazines, books, and gallery and museum catalogues. She holds a BA in Visual Arts - Economics from Barnard College and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dayal teaches at Barnard College and the School of Visual Arts in New York.

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.