“Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon“ comprises dance, large-scale video installation, drawings, photographs, sculpture, and paintings throughout the Museum’s expansive third-floor galleries, alongside a synchronous monthly program of live works in a dedicated performance space. One of the most significant figures to emerge from New York’s downtown scene in the 1980s, Lemon engages deeply with the legacies of postmodern dance in the US and the capacity for storytelling through movement—reflecting on the state of performance in the museum, on stage, in celebration, and in daily life. Together, Lemon’s works position the body as an archive of raw emotion, physical labor, and received histories to challenge the ways we have been taught to see the world.
“Ceremonies Out of the Air“ highlights Lemon’s sustained collaborations across disciplines, materials, and time. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Rant redux (2020–24), a major four-channel video and sound installation realized with Kevin Beasley and based on the live performance Rant (2019–ongoing). Composed of layered movement, sound, and video, this energetic tour de force is enacted by some of the most influential artists working in performance today—including Beasley, Okwui Okpokwasili, Samita Sinha, Darrell Jones, and Lemon himself. Lemon describes Rant redux, planned and produced in New York City immediately prior to the COVID-19 lockdown, as an exploded documentary of a “very loud [ . . . ] Brown/Black body cultural experiment in rage, freedom, and/or ecstasy.” Another highlight of the exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of his foundational 1856 Cessna Road (2002–24), a cycle of videos, photographs, and artifacts made in close partnership with Walter Carter and his family. A former sharecropper—who lived through Jim Crow in the Cotton Belt town of Little Yazoo, Mississippi—Carter developed a series of “task-based para-performances” in response to Lemon’s choreographic instructions, which slowly transformed into a speculative science-fiction opus on the afterlife of historical violence, the intimacy of artistic collaboration, and biography as social history.
Bringing into focus works that resist broad classification, “Ceremonies Out of the Air” illustrates Lemon’s characteristic style of deflection, or what he calls “fugitivity.” His anarchic, movement-based works obliterate formalist conventions, skewer straightforward tellings of history, and consider how time and place materialize in muscle memory. Recording daily events from diasporic Black life and culture, Lemon’s works on paper conflate these narratives with renderings of recognizable artworks and fantastical imagery, as well as vibrant color. His video works riff on cult figures like artist Bruce Nauman and writer James Baldwin. Across media, these works shed new light on Lemon’s connected interests in the mundane and the infinite, in dedication and spiritual release.
at MoMA PS1, New York
until March 24, 2025