Ralph Lemon puts a mirror to his own enigmatic persona in Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon at MoMA PS1. Much like Lemon himself, the exhibition defies categorization, blending and blurring his roles as an artist, choreographer, and writer. The result is a body of work that is at once confounding and poetic, absurd yet deeply relatable, offering a fragmented yet illuminating glimpse into the intricate workings of the artist’s mind.
We’re introduced to Lemon’s unconventional practice with “Rant redux” (2020–24), an engulfing four-channel video. On some screens, actors and dancers rave, writhe, and play in unchoreographed movements to a rhythmic score by artist Kevin Beasley, while on others, Lemon shouts excerpts of texts by Fred Moten, Angela Davis, Kathy Acker, Saidiya Hartman, and himself. Sitting on the bench, I found myself in sensory overload, unaccustomed to this frenetic and anxious performance. Lemon’s ability to combine Black joy, grief, anger, and spirituality transcends so many other bodily expressions that I’ve seen — his choreography isn’t bound by traditional dance forms or even the avant-garde experimentation of, say, the Judson Dance Theater, Martha Graham, or Alvin Ailey. Instead, movement becomes a form of raw testimony in his visceral work. In “Rant redux,” the dancers’ bodies seem to narrate histories of resilience without the constraining need to be beautiful or polished. The urgency of their erratic motions leaves no room for passive spectatorship.
In the following spaces, the focus shifts from performance to the introspective practice and meditative exploration that Lemon discovers through drawing. The first room features works on paper from his ongoing series Untitled (The greeted [Black] art history story ever told. Unfinished) (2016–present), which reinterprets and reshapes art history through a Black lens. These are diary-like accumulations of small, separate yet often overlapping figurative vignettes. In one, a Black female tennis player bends down in front of a warthog, while above them an Edo-period Shunga-style orgy takes place. In another, Lemon recreates what he calls a “blackified” version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” placed alongside a scene of bunnies frolicking in the snow and a brown-painted Sphinx, all positioned in close proximity. In a nearby gallery, these sporadic scenes become abstracted into fields of color recalling the work of Sonia Delaunay and the Orphism movement in the series Untitled (Rapture Weft). Lemon refers to these geometric patterns as mandalas, the circular forms evoking suns, stars, moons, and even spaceships.
Also on view are wooden statues from the 1940s and ’50s, dressed to resemble Beyonce and Jay-Z, adorned with a fur coat, silver choker, t-shirt, and handbag. According to the wall text, Lemon juxtaposes these traditional African sculptures with the two modern cultural icons — behemoth entertainers and businesspeople — to explore a “tradition with the energy to honor and maintain the spirits of ancestors and the dead.” By linking the sculptures’ historical and spiritual significance to the performers’ modern symbolism of empowerment and creativity, Lemon bridges ancestral legacies with contemporary narratives of influence (though the work could have addressed the commodification of legacies by megastars more critically). It’s impossible to overlook the artist’s own history when encountering these West African statues. In 1995, after disbanding his dance company, he embarked on a journey of artistic rediscovery, traveling through Africa, Asia, and the American South, where he deeply engaged with various communities to learn about their rituals, cultures, art, and dance practices.
As part of his travels, he met Walter Carter, a former sharecropper who lived through Jim Crow in Mississippi. Their relationships resulted in a collaborative series of videos, photographs, and artifacts, entitled Cessna Road (2002–24). The series documents Carter’s “task-based para-performances,” which he developed in response to Lemon’s choreographic instructions. In one set of photographs, we encounter the rugged terrain of Mississippi Delta’s Little Yazoo, while in videos and drawings, Carter appears in a silver spacesuit and helmet, referring to his lifelong dream of space travel. Lemon even constructed a spaceship from recycled and found materials, imagining Carter’s vision of reaching the moon.
After Carter’s passing, Lemon and his family performed a memorial dance that culminated in a meal. “Godhead under the kitchen table”(2024), a reimagined version of the meal table, is part of the exhibition. As the security guard nearby joked, “sunglasses are required”: under the aluminum table are strings of intense, glaring light bulbs that radiate heat and light so blinding it cannot be stared at directly. This is a fitting metaphor for the enduring brilliance of Lemon and Carter’s collaboration, as well as Lemon’s luminous legacy of storytelling, memory, and transformation.
Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon continues at MoMA PS1 (22–25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens) through March 24, 2025. The exhibition was organized by Connie Butler and Thomas Lax with Kari Rittenbach.
