Arnold Kemp | Artist, Curator, and Poet

Just before he was scheduled to do a poetry reading at SFMOMA last year in response to a work in the collection as part of the Pop-Up Poets Series for the exhibition The Steins Collect, Arnold Kemp discovered that Mary Heilmann’s Fire and Ice Remix had been taken off view. “I asked the Museum to project an image of the painting on a blank wall,” Kemp says. He printed copies of the painting which he gave to the audience. Some were in color. Some in black and white. He told the audience that before he would read, they had to take a minute to try to transform the projection into the actual painting. More