#ralphlemon

Ralph Lemon is one of this year's Francis J. Greenburger Award winners!

RSVP to celebrate with us on the Art Omi website! Ralph Lemon, is choreographer, writer, visual artist and curator, and the Artistic Director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. His most recent works include Scaffold Room (2015), Four Walls (2012), and How Can You Stay in The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere? (2008-2010), works with live performance, film and visual art that toured throughout the U.S. The immersive visual art installation, Meditation, which was part of How Can You Stay, was acquired for the permanent collection of the Walker Arts Center in 2012. In January 2011, a re-imagined section of How Can You Stay was per-formed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in conjunction with On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. Mr. Lemon curated the fall 2012 performance series “Some sweet day” at MOMA, and the acclaimed 2010 performance series “I Get Lost” at Danspace Project in NYC. His solo visual art exhibitions include: 1856 Cessna Road at Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC (2012); How Can You Stay In The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere?, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2010); (the efflorescence of) Walter, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008), The Kitchen, NYC (2007) and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2006); The Geography Trilogy, Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (2001); and Temples, Margaret Bodell Gallery, NYC (2000).  His group exhibitions include: Move: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery, London, UK and The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC. In 2012, Mr. Lemon was honored with one of the first Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards; he was also one of the first artists to receive the United States Artists Fellowship (2006). He is recipient of three "Bessie" Awards (1986, 2005, 2016); two Foundation for Contemporary Art Awards (1986, 2012); a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship; a 2004 Bellagio Study Center Fellowship; and the 1999 CalArts Alpert Award. Among his many teaching positions, Mr. Lemon has been an IDA Fellow at Stanford University (2009); artist-in-residence at Temple University (2005-06); Miller Endowment Visiting Artist at the Krannert Center (2004); Fellow of the Humanities Council and Program in Theater & Dance at Princeton University (2002); and Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre (1996-2000). For the fall 2011 semester he was a Visiting Critic with the Yale University, School of Art, Sculpture Dept. He was the 2014 Annenberg Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, where he curated a series of “performance essays,” titled, Value Talks. In 2015 he was a Mellon Foundation Visiting Artist Fellow at Columbia University. In 2017 he was Professor of Practice of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. He was the 2018 Josep Lluis Sert Practitioner at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University. He is currently Sachs Visiting Professor at University of Pennsylvania, and a Visual Arts Mentor at Columbia University School of the Arts. His book, Come home Charley Patton, the final in a series documenting The Geography Trilogy, was published in 2013 by Wesleyan University Press. He received a 2015 National Medal of Arts from president, Barack Obama. The first monograph of his work was published by The Museum Of Modern Art (part of their new Modern Dance Series) in 2016. He is a 2018 percipient of the Heinz Family Foundation Award.

illuminati.

Ralph Lemon has been dancing since the late 70′s. He graduated with a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1975, and began dancing with the Nancy Hauser Dance Company, whose work was influenced by Hanya Holm. Lemon also worked with Meredith Monk in New York City. 

Eventually Lemon created the Ralph Lemon Dance Company which disbanded after ten years in 1995. This marked a shift in Lemon’s work. He started working on larger projects that were cross disciplinary. In 2004 he created Geography Trilogy which is a multimedia work that discusses the experience of Asian, African, and Black American experience throughout the Southeastern part of the United States. Lemon traveled through the American south and met former blues musicians and their descendants. These interviews served to inform his work. All three parts of Geography Trilogy had a collaborative component to them.Whether by Lemon interviewing blues musicians, or going to parts of Africa or Asia, and creating dialogues with other persons, histories, ways of moving, Lemon’s work is an active conversation, in which audience members, gallery patrons are invited to sit in on. 

This is very clear in Lemon’s work  (the efflorescence of) Walter. This work chronicles an 8 year relationship that Lemon had with a elderly black man in Little Yazoo, Mississippi named Walter Carter who Lemon met while doing research. The project consists of various scores that Lemon and Carter created, installations, drawings, text, mixed media. This work asks the fundamental question of what is the artist’s role in society, and shows us a way in which we can remove some of the hierarchy and inaccessibility of art. 

Really really strong rehearsal today, though I was initially saddened by everyone being late. But it was cool to have Mariana there from New York, and Marie there documenting. But still, everyone was late or had to leave early. And that is (mostly) because of life, which (in part) is related to struggle. There is a heavy sentiment of struggle amongst many of us right now. I feel weighted and slowed by it. The joy of working out a score and moving our bodies together was dampened by confronting my own inadequacy in the face of friends' and my own trauma/heartbrake/self-disappointment afterward. 

This is how I feel. I wish.

My head swims today with conversations cobbled together by the poems and sobs and diary entries of Ralph Lemon, Rae Paris, Dawn Lundy Martin, Amara Tabor-Smith, and still Saidiya Hartman goddamit. Mostly, the conversation is about memory.

I recently forgot my word and destroyed a relationship.

I cannot, for the life of me, remember my grandmother. Even though she lived with us briefly when we were kids, even though we used to pay her to clean our house.

Saidiya is compelling me to think of memory as a place, bordering a continent on three sides and an ocean on one, where you return to when you decide you do, after all, need territory.

Dawn is compelling me to think of memory as an opaque thing that, from time to time, "might obstruct the noticing of other things, and thus, the reinvention of the contemporary self."

Rae is compelling me to think of memory as both there and not there. Like a cardboard box both in that it is a solid and real place to store things, and in that it can be a house or a blanket or a fort or a tree.

This weekend, Amara made me very confused about memory. Which way does it go? More on this later.

I am more confused than before.