Virtual Conversation: Arnold Kemp, Ian Cooper, and Hamza Walker discuss FALSE HYDRAS

Please join us on Zoom this Saturday, May 8 at 4pm for a conversation between Arnold Kemp, Ian Cooper and Hamza Walker as they discuss Kemp’s exhibition FALSE HYDRAS.

The exhibition—Kemp’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles—consists of recent photography, print and sculpture works that consider the refraction of biographical narrative through social signifiers such as race and gender.

An artist, poet and educator, most recently as Dean of Graduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Kemp has been making and exhibiting critically engaged art about race, sexuality, appropriation, and authorship for the past 25 years. He is often described as an artist’s artist, but he has found his greatest kinship with writers, specifically those affiliated with the New Narrative movement out of San Francisco.

Kemp will be joined in conversation with Ian Cooper, artist, producer and creative director of Monkeypaw Productions, and Hamza Walker, curator and executive director of LAXART.

As director Jordan Peele’s producing partner, Ian Cooper has worked on the critically acclaimed 2019 film, Us, as well as the forthcoming Candyman, which Peele co-wrote and Nia DaCosta directed. Cooper is currently prepping to shoot Peele’s third directorial outing, which stars Academy Award winner Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Academy Award nominee Steven Yeun, with a release date set for summer 2022.

Cooper is also a visual artist with a focus on mixed media sculpture, and was a faculty member in the studio art department at New York University from 2005 – 2016 where he taught sculpture and was the head of the undergraduate thesis program. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad over the past several decades, and his work sits in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Perez Art Museum in Miami.

Hamza Walker is the executive director of the Los Angeles nonprofit art space LAXART and an adjunct professor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to joining LAXART in 2016, he was director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society, a non-collecting contemporary art museum in Chicago, for 22 years where he organized numerous shows and public programming and wrote extensively on the field of contemporary art.

Notable shows at the Renaissance Society include “Suicide Narcissus” (2013), “Black Is, Black Ain’t” (2008) and “New Video, New Europe” (2004). In addition to his work at the Renaissance Society, Walker also co-curated the Made in L.A. 2016 biennial. He has won the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement in 2014 and the prestigious Ordway Prize in 2010 for his significant impact on the field of contemporary art.

Arnold J. Kemp’s works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, and the Portland Art Museum among others. Kemp is the recipient of  awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, among others. Recent exhibitions include “WHEN THE SICK RULE THE WORLD”, (Biquini Wax, Mexico City); “THE STUPIDITY OF BELIEF”, (Iceberg Projects, Chicago); and “THE BIG DARK” w/ artist Kristan Kennedy, (Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR). Kemp’s work has also been shown recently at the Drawing Center, New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and his work is featured in Nia DaCosta’s film  “Candyman” (Monkeypaw Productions, 2020). Kemp lives and works in Chicago, and until recently was dean of graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.