from out of space
Ralph Lemon is a multidisciplinary artist, the founder of the Ralph Lemon Dance Company (1985-1995), and one of the most significant figures to emerge from New York’s postmodern performance scene in the last 30 years. His multifaceted practice has pushed the boundaries of performance to include installation art, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, film and video. He is the author of The Geography Trilogy, (1997, 2000, and 2004), a three-part compendium of performances, writings, scores, drawings, and photographs surveying three continents and addressing history, race, and the power of memory. He had one-person exhibitions at The Kitchen (2007), the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008) and the Studio Museum in Harlem (2012), and was included in MoMA’s Performance Exhibition Series, a program of live performance in conjunction with the exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2011). The museum published the artist’s first monograph, Ralph Lemon by Thomas J. Lax (2016). He was the subject of a 20-year survey, Ceremonies Out of the Air, curated by Connie Butler and Lax, which opened at MoMA PS1 in November 2024.
Works by Ralph Lemon are in important public collections such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He has held fellowships and residencies at Yale, Stanford, Brown, Temple, Princeton, the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois, and the Museum of Modern Art. He is a Visual Arts Mentor at Columbia University School of the Arts.
Lemon was honored with one of the first Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards (2012); he was also one of the first artists to receive the United States Artists Fellowship (2006). He is a recipient of three “Bessie” Awards (1986, 2005, 2016); two Foundation for Contemporary Art Awards (1986, 2012); a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship; and the 1999 CalArts Alpert Award. In 2015, he received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. He is a 2018 recipient of the Heinz Family Foundation Award and a 2020 “Genius” grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. In 2022 he won the Bucksbaum Award for his work included in that year’s Whitney Biennial. He was awarded a 2024 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He lives and works in New York and Philadelphia.
His literary archive is in the Yale Collection of American Literature at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He received a BA from Harvard, an MA from Johns Hopkins, and a Ph.D. from Princeton; he won a Whiting Writers Award, and was a co-winner of the Discovery/The Nation Poetry Prize. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Yale and a Visiting Professor in the Yale School of Art’s painting department, he is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.