Paula Cooper Gallery now represents interdisciplinary artist Ralph Lemon, whose major survey at MoMA PS1 in New York opens next month.
With a practice that spans dance and performance, painting and drawing, installation, and more, Lemon is known for creating works that defy the conventions of a given medium and push the form to its limits and ultimately to new heights. Looking at the past decade of his career, PS1 exhibition, “Ceremonies Out of the Air,” will be sure to further cement Lemon’s status as an important figure in contemporary art.
Throughout his career, Lemon has received numerous awards to honor his contributions, including being in the inaugural cohort of the United States Artists Fellowship in 2006, a 2015 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama, the Heinz Family Foundation Award in 2018, a MacArthur “Genius” fellowship in 2020, and the Bucksbaum Award for his contribution to the 2022 Whitney Biennial.
Lemon first emerged in the Downtown scene, where he founded his Ralph Lemon Dance Company, which ran from 1985 to 1995. He disbanded the company seeking a new challenge in art-making and soon began extensive travel and research that would define his groundbreaking The Geography Trilogy (1997–2004). That piece was the first of many to use dance and movement as a departure point to create ambitious, multidimensional installations and performances.
“I’m expanding a constellation of parts: a part about performance, a part about writing, a part about making visual marks, there’s a part that’s just about thinking, a certain kind of philosophy, and there’s the primary part/action that’s about working with other human beings,” Lemon said in a statement.
The final chapter of The Geography Trilogy focused on the American South, and it was during that process he would meet Walter Carter, a centenarian and former sharecropper from Mississippi who would become a collaborator and a guiding figure for many of Lemon’s future works, including his 2007 exhibition, “(the efflorescence of) Walter,” at The Kitchen in New York, which was his first show in an arts institution. The PS1 exhibition will feature a new work, 1856 Cessna Road (2002–24), which looks at Lemon’s collaboration with Carter as well as how he continued that collaboration with Carter’s family in the years since his death.
In an email to ARTnews, Anthony Allen, a partner at Paula Copper Gallery and a cocurator of the Kitchen exhibition, said, “Working with Ralph on his 2007 show at the Kitchen was a revelation for me. He is an artist whose work traverses and transcends any imagined boundaries between art forms. As a dancer and choreographer, he approaches the creative act in a truly collaborative way, and has uniquely expanded the way we encounter visual art in museums and performance spaces. We’re so excited to work with him within our gallery’s context, and to see what new forms his openness and generosity will bring.”
