Arnold J. Kemp is a poet and artist. At Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco he was a founding curator, and he worked there from 1993- 2003. He was working with Kathy Acker, as Yerba Buena’s first visiting artist, before she became too ill to complete the residency. Alternately Kemp engaged Dennis Cooper as a visiting artist and co-curated “Guide to Trust No. 2” an exhibition inspired by Cooper’s novels. Kemp is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others. His artworks are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2016 Kemp became the Dean of Graduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.