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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 Chorus (2015), 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 performed 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: Chorus at the Stededlijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Underground Museum, Los Angeles (2017/2018), 1856 Cessna Road at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC (2012); How Can You Stay In The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere? at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2010); (the efflorescence of) Walter, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008), The Kitchen, NYC (2007), and the 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, and The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC. His works are in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum.
In 2012, Ralph 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 a 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. In 2015, he received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.
His book, Come home Charley Patton, the final volume in a series documenting The Geography Trilogy, was published in 2013 by Wesleyan University Press. The first monograph of his work was published by MoMA as part of their new Modern Dance Series in 2016. He is a 2018 recipient of the Heinz Family Foundation Award, a 2019 recipient of the Francis J. Greenberger Award, a 2020 recipient of an American Academy in Berlin Fellowship and a 2020 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and, in 2021, was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
