Ralph Lemon for “Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon” at MoMA PS1, New York
November 14, 2024–March 24, 2025
Never content to work in just one medium, Ralph Lemon spent the past three decades creating works that blur the divisions between dance, drawing, painting, installation, sculpture, and writing. He started out as a dancer and choreographer, operating the Ralph Lemon Dance Company for a decade before disbanding it in 1995 to focus on other artistic endeavors. Lemon sees his practice as being one of generative collaboration in which anything and everything can be a form of art-making.
Those pursuits, which first resulted in Geography Trilogy (1996–2004), would lead him to the American South, where he would meet Walter Carter, a former sharecropper from Mississippi. Lemon would collaborate with Carter on multiple projects, many of which were not necessarily meant to result in artworks. Lemon asked Carter to perform various tasks—which Carter was free to interpret in any way—and the artist documented his activities. After Carter’s death in 2002, Lemon continued to return to Mississippi, collaborating with his family. “Walter was a godhead for me,” Lemon told Art in America. “He became the locus of a lot of my work for a long time because he represented so much: a Black man in the South, born and raised in Mississippi, in a small town you couldn’t find unless you had an intricate map.”
Those videos with Carter and, later, his family, formed the crux of Lemon’s MoMA PS1 exhibition, curated by Connie Butler and Thomas Lax. In one, Carter harvests string; in another, his family tends to a garden. These pieces were exhibited alongside others by Lemon that featured found African sculptures adorned with contemporary clothing as well as drawings dense with figures. One gallery featured the four-channel video Rant (redux), which documented a collaborative performance with Kevin Beasley, Okwui Okpokwasili, and others; an adjoining gallery featured the detritus of this performance. Accompanying the exhibition was a robust performance schedule that further activated the exhibition.
This is difficult work to show within an exhibition space, which was one reason why, when the curators initially approached Lemon about a survey of this scale, he initially demurred before ultimately agreeing. But the PS1 show made the energy of Lemon’s practice feel palpable, which is a testament to its strength.
Nominees:
Candida Alvarez
“Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop”El Museo del barrio, New York
April 24–August 3, 2025
Carl Cheng
“Carl Cheng: Nature Never Loses”
Austin Contemporary, Texas
September 6–December 8, 2024
Raymond Saunders
“Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden”
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
March 22–July 13, 2025
Steina
“Steina: Playback”
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts
October 26, 2024–January 12, 2025
