NEW YORK, NY.- Paula Cooper Gallery announced representation of the multidisciplinary artist Ralph Lemon (b. 1952). He is an acclaimed dancer and choreographer, founder of the Ralph Lemon Dance Company (1985-1995), and one of the most significant figures to emerge from New York’s postmodern performance scene in the last 30 years. Lemon has long garnered accolades for his multifaceted practice, pushing the boundaries of performance to include installation art, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, film and video. He uses this expanded understanding of performance as a means into the confluence of cultural memory, emotion, identity, and history expressed through the human body.

Lemon’s work is currently on view in Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum. His installation Rant redux, created in collaboration with Kevin Beasley, premiered at the Walker Art Center in October. He is the subject of a 20-year survey, Ceremonies Out of the Air, curated by Connie Butler and Thomas J. Lax, which opens November 14 at MoMA PS1.

Born in Cincinnati, Lemon grew up in Minneapolis, where he graduated from the University of Minnesota (1975). Shortly after, in 1976, he became a co-founding member of Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theatre Company, a multiracial professional company dedicated to exploring race and social justice through theater. At the invitation of Meredith Monk, he moved to New York in 1978 and performed with her company before founding his own company in 1985. In 1995, Lemon disbanded the Ralph Lemon Dance Company to re-focus his practice and pursue a broader artistic vision. Years of global travel resulted in the performance and publication of The Geography Trilogy (1997, 2000 and 2004), a three-part compendium of performances, writings, scores, drawings, and photographs surveying three continents and addressing history, race, the power of memory, and the possibility of intercultural collaboration.

Lemon’s first institutional foray in the visual arts was the presentation of (the efflorescence of) Walter at the Kitchen in 2007. The exhibition, co-curated by Claire Tancons and Paula Cooper Gallery’s Anthony Allen, revolved around the tutelary figure of Walter Carter, a centenarian and former sharecropper from Yazoo City, MS, with whom Lemon developed a “meta-theatrical” relationship in which actions scripted by Lemon were translated and transformed in Carter’s performance and improvisations. The collaboration with Walter Carter grew to include his entire family and resulted in further exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008) and the Studio Museum in Harlem (2012).

In 2011, Lemon was included in MoMA’s Performance Exhibition Series, a program of live performance in conjunction with the exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. He also curated the performance series Some sweet day (2012) and Value Talks (2013/14) at MoMA. The museum published the artist’s first monograph, Ralph Lemon, by Thomas J. Lax (2016). In 2014, Lemon premiered Scaffold Room at the Walker Art Center, a “lecture-performance-musical” considering ideas of performance through the prism of archetypal black female personae in American culture.

Director of MoMA PS1 Connie Butler writes: “The body, in Lemon's lexicon, is a witness to our time with a boundless possibility for imagining. He understands that abstract movement is […] an abstraction: that everything is an abstraction of experience and emotion, is historical and deeply held in the body but also released […] and surfaced by the problem of living in this impossible time, in this impossible country, now and every day, for all of us.” [1]

A profoundly interdisciplinary artist, Lemon has collaborated with other artists and writers such as Kevin Beasley, John Cale, Rhys Chatham, Anthony Davis, Saidiya Hartman, Isaac Julien, Christian Marclay, Sarah Michelson, Fred Moten, Okwui Okpokwasili, Marina Rosenfeld, Nari Ward, and others.

Lemon was honored with one of the first Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards (2012); he was also one of the first artists to receive the United States Artists Fellowship (2006). He is a recipient of three "Bessie" Awards (1986, 2005, 2016); two Foundation for Contemporary Art Awards (1986, 2012); a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship; and the 1999 CalArts Alpert Award. He received a 2015 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. He is a 2018 recipient of the Heinz Family Foundation Award and a 2020 “Genius” grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 2022 he won the Bucksbaum Award for his work included in that year’s Whitney Biennial. He was awarded a 2024 Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

Works by Ralph Lemon are in important public collections such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He has held fellowships and residencies at Yale University, Stanford University, Brown University, Temple University, Princeton University, the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois, and the Museum of Modern Art. He is a Visual Arts Mentor at Columbia University School of the Arts. He lives and works in New York and Philadelphia.

[1] Connie Butler, “An Intimate Rebellion”, in Ceremonies out of the Air, exh. catalogue, forthcoming.