Ralph Lemon

Ralph Lemon, Ceremonies Out of the Air 
MoMA/PS1, until 24 March 2025 

Ralph Lemon, one of the most respected American choreographers who has been working for 40 years, is being celebrated with a major exhibition at MoMA/PS1 in NY. Unfortunately, he is under-recognized in France where only a few of his works have been shown such as a commission by the Lyon ballet in 2009 and a participation in Camping (CND) in 2018. Organized by the new PS1 director Connie Butler and the curators Thomas J. Lax and Kari Rittenbach, the exhibition launches the highly anticipated programming of the former director of the Hammer Museum in LA. Citing the founder of PS1, Alanna Heiss, who initiated the idea of bringing dance into the museum program, Connie Butler stressed the importance of Ralph Lemon’s œuvre, specifically his performances at MoMA in the aughts. 

Exhibiting dance at a museum is never an easy task and yet this fall in NY, no less than two exhibitions are confronting this challenge – Alvin Ailey at the Whitney Museum (curated by Adrienne Edwards) and Ralph Lemon at PS1 – two black choreographers who each broke the codes and taboos around the performance of the black body. 

The Ralph Lemon exhibition opens with a powerful video installation created from one of his latest choreographic pieces, Rant (redux). It also further explores the visual aspect of his practice. Rant is a series that the artist has been developing for several years, in collaboration with the artist Kevin Beasley. Over immersive music punctuated with bass sounds composed by Beasley, we hear Lemon’s voice quoting authors who inspired him such as Angela Davies and Fred Moten, while the performers enter in trance-like states performing hypnotic movements.  

The piece was filmed at The Kitchen in NY in February 2020, coinciding with the beginning of Covid followed by Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis (Ralph Lemon’s hometown). Lemon describes this work as “a corporeal cultural experimentation of brown and black bodies” that powerfully conveys the ideas of despair, joy and anger of these racialized bodies. In the adjacent room, props used for the performance are exhibited after having been reworked by the artists: a chair with Lemon’s notes reconfigured by Beasley, and a microphone on a stand surrounded by pieces of fabric and residue transformed into a sculpture. 

Ralph Lemon was born in 1952 in Cincinnati and grew up in Minneapolis. An interest in dance led him to follow the teaching of Nancy Hauser, a choreographer and modern dance teacher. He also immersed himself in the programming of the Walker Art Center where he discovered the work of Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. It was the great era of postmodern dance in NY.  

After attending a Meredith Monk show in 1978 and doing a workshop with her, he joined her company for several years before founding his own. Several years of creation and touring in the United States and around the world followed. However, in 1995, he decided to disband his company in order to devote himself to research and travels that took him to Africa and South East Asia where he created several choreographic pieces but also visual works as well as an unusual collaboration with Walter Carter, a sharecropper from Mississippi. 

The exhibition retraces 20 years of artistic creation, starting with his drawings, such as his Untitled series. The greatest (Black) art history ever told. Unfinished : a composition of figures drawn in various scenes from art history, popular culture and political history. These drawings tell a personal story of the artist – a dive into the events that marked his life and his research. 

Another series of paintings on paper entitled Rapture Weft explores the figure of the mandala in a composition that is entirely abstract (inspired by the Japanese ichimatsu checkerboard pattern) which recalls the artist’s interest in Buddhism and spirituality. 

Another part of the exhibition shows a set of African statuettes that Lemon dressed in custom-made miniature costumes, including Beyonce and Jay Z’s (aka The Carters) costumes in the music video, “Apeshit” (2018) that they filmed at the Louvre,” undoubtedly one of the most striking dance sequences filmed in a museum. The video makes prophetic references to Black Lives Matter with shots of kneeling figures or arms outstretched in protest. 

A large part of the exhibition is devoted to his collaboration with Walter Carter, a Mississippi farmer who the artist met in 2006 and who he describes as a mentor. Inspired by this encounter, he began working with Carter until his death in 2010. Fascinated by the exploration of space, Carter built a DIY spaceship that is also on display and dressed his dogs in silver jumpsuits calling them the Killer Spacedogs. Lemon will continue to film this colorful character and his family until his death. They will carry out “para-performances” in a lush natural setting, dressed in animal costumes, the films of which can be seen in the exhibition as vestiges of these actions. This touching long-term collaboration allows the artist to reconnect with his roots (both his parents were from the South, Georgia and South Carolina) and his slave ancestry while immersing the viewers in a surreal and poetic universe. 

Lemon’s drawings dedicated to Alvin Ailey are currently on view in the Ailey retrospective at the Whitney Museum, an exhibition curated by Adrienne Edwards which traces the direct influences of the choreographer through archival documents, while also exhibiting works by important black artists in the United States such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi or Lorna Simpson as well as black European artists like Lynette Yiadom-Boake. Lemon’s works on paper were also shown in the 2022 Whitney Biennial co-curated by Adrienne Edwards, for which he received the Bucksbaum Prize. 

For a non NY-based audience eager to discover the diverse choreographic work of Ralph Lemon (PS1 also offering a large program of performances), this presentation may be disappointing since it is oriented towards the visual universe of the artist. Yet at the same time, it has the merit of opening Lemon’s rich, layered, and deeply intuitive practice to a much larger audience. It also gives – and this is undoubtedly the point to be emphasized here – another perspective onto dance in the museum; an expanded vision that takes the body in movement as well as the costumes and props into account in its recontextualization. 

---

Head image : Ralph Lemon and Kevin Beasley, Rant (redux), 2020–24. 4-channel HD video color, 8-channel sound, 14 min. Exhibition view of Ralph Lemon, « Ceremonies Out of the Air », MoMA PS1. Photo : Steven Paneccasio.

• Share:
  ,
• By the same author: