“Artwork, given the correct circumstances, might get very small, airtight and quiet—or huge and messy. It might seem like, to cite the painter and poet Etel Adnan, “the massive mess of getting a life.”
—Arnold J. Kemp
Artists House is happy to announce “LIFE—a bunch present”, curated by Chicago-based artist and educator Arnold J. Kemp. Within the phrases of its curator, this exhibition “is an armature that helps the continuation of a dialog that I used to be having with the artist Pope.L (1955 – 2023) for 4 years earlier than his premature passing.” Spanning your entire floor ground, “LIFE—a bunch present” incorporates a dynamic array of kinds—work, sculptures, objects, architectural interventions, movies, stay performances, and newly commissioned poetry, that categorical the joyful, mundane, and atrociously unstable textures of sheer existence.
Taking part artists embrace: Lindsay Adams, Zarouhie Abdalian, Israel Aten, Nick Bastis, Nayland Blake, Gregg Bordowitz, Carolyn Castaño, Patty Chang, Mike Cloud, D’Talentz (Nikita Gale, Aryel René Jackson, Tomashi Jackson, Ashley Teamer), Christopher Garrett, Renee Gladman, Robert Glück, Lydia Gray, Léonie Guyer, David Hammons, Geoffrey Hendricks, Xylor Jane, Margaret L. Kemp, Kristan Kennedy, Jinn Bronwen Lee, Eric N. Mack, Devin T. Mays, Malcolm Peacock, Pope.L, Nick Raffel, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Mindy Rose Schwartz, Cauleen Smith, Cameron Spratley, Catherine Sullivan (with George Lewis and Sean Griffin), Assortment of Sur Rodney (Sur), Mami Takahashi, Christine Tien Wang, Fred Wilson, and poets David Buuck, Tonya Foster, Erica Hunt, and John Keene.
Famend for work that upended conventions round race, language, masculinity, and citizenship, Pope.L’s follow was each radical and intimate—qualities that resonate all through this exhibition. Whereas it’s not a memorial, the presentation stems from what Kemp describes as “an engagement in opposition to the amnesia that surfaces after a liked one passes.” Reasonably than closing a chapter, the present extends the vitality of an ongoing dialogue, by gathering rising and established artists, writers, and performers who be a part of Pope.L and Kemp in confronting the complexity, absurdity, and materiality of being alive.
“LIFE—a bunch present” is Kemp’s first curatorial challenge in 20 years. Rising within the early Nineteen Nineties, his speculative, conceptually wealthy follow has been matched by astute and visionary curatorial work, a pursuit he started in 1993 when he was Affiliate Curator on the Yerba Buena Artwork Heart in San Francisco. Via the intertwined pathways of his profession, Kemp has held a sustained interrogation of themes round identification, stereotypes, and notions of “sameness.” A big determine in conceptual and efficiency artwork, his method to curation mirrors his broader creative follow: intuitive, interdisciplinary, and deeply rooted in summoning Black expertise with out solidifying it right into a steady identification. Reflecting on his previous curatorial work with figures like Mark Dion, Laylah Ali, Tracey Moffatt, Viola Frey, and within the case of musician duo Matmos, Kemp writes: “in that exhibition, life and the actual world met artwork in a method that encapsulated what I wished to most do as a curator, which was to get out of the way in which of what artwork and artists can do and to easily enable artwork to occur, similar to a UFO sighting, a cloud or a sudden rainstorm.”
At its coronary heart, “LIFE—a bunch present” gives the exhibition itself as a sort of dwelling construction—a densely networked constellation for holding feeling, contradiction, and dialogue. Kemp’s acute imaginative and prescient brings collectively a multivocal, intergenerational gathering of artists who, every in their very own method, reply to the dissonance and depth of being right here—collectively, now.
at Artists House, New York
till August 9, 2025
