Ralph Lemon Talks about Dance, Drawing, and Maintaining a Decades-Long Generative Practice

Working in the contexts of dance, drawing, painting, installation, and writing, New York–based Ralph Lemon has expanded what art can be through a generative practice that questions the conventions of his different disciplines and his body’s relationship to each. Through an interest in theater, he discovered dance by the likes of Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk. He recalled seeing Monk’s Quarry: an opera in three movements (1976) and being completely “in wonderment of the body” and the “totality of her idea of performance.” Lemon followed Monk around in 1978 to experience her performances and joined a workshop with her, after which she invited him to move to New York and join her company.

Born in 1952, Lemon rose to prominence in the ’80s downtown scene as founder of the Ralph Lemon Dance Company, creating works like Joy (1990), set to a score composed by John Cale. He disbanded the company in 1995 and, over the course of some 10 years, developed what would become the Geography Trilogy (1996–2004), which explored his research into the cultures of Africa, Asia, and the American South, and their various traditions of dance and movement. The work took the form of movement-based multimedia pieces; part three, Come home Charley Patton, involved close collaboration with Walter Carter, a former Mississippi sharecropper with whom Lemon worked until Carter’s death in 2002.

Lemon exhibited hundreds of drawings in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, in a presentation that rotated during the exhibition’s run. His drawings and a video are among works by dozens of artists in “Edges of Ailey,” a show devoted to dance icon Alvin Ailey that runs through February 9 at the Whitney. And MoMA PS1 opened “Ceremonies Out of the Air” this past November, a major survey that features more than 60 of Lemon’s works made in the last decade, including 1856 Cessna Road (2002–24), a video series that incorporates documentation of his collaboration with Carter, and Rant redux (2020–24), a four-channel sound and video installation based on collaborative performance work with sculptor and sound artist Kevin Beasley. Below, Lemon discusses his long engagement with dance, working within institutions, and navigating the personal and public possibilities of art.

Had you already formulated an idea for the Geography Trilogy when you ended the Ralph Lemon Dance Company in 1995?

That was kind of an accident. When I disbanded the company, it had more to do with feeling like I was [leading] an organization more than an art practice. I was like, What do I do? My friends said, “Go to Africa. Get out into the world.” I started traveling to parts of West Africa, having a conversation with that dance community. The Geography Trilogy began with dance artists from Cote d’Ivoire and Guinea. I loved working in that foreign environment, where I was more a tourist than anything else. It destabilized any confidence I had. It took a lot of my identity apart, and I thought, I want to keep doing this. That’s how it became a three-part trilogy. It was more about the research than the making. Conceptually, it felt important to show that there’s a certain messiness to trying to understand something beyond what you understand. Ultimately, it was about the cacophony of different kinds of languages and practices. The third part, Come home Charley Patton, is about coming back home, which I wanted to be about a place I should have known but didn’t: the Black American South.

Walter Carter was a collaborator for Come home Charley Patton. What was the working process with him like?

Walter was a godhead for me. He became a symbol of a way of life, a kind of Blackness, a generative fantasy that was real. He became the locus of a lot of my work for a long time because he represented so much: a Black man in the South, born and raised in Mississippi, in a small town you couldn’t find unless you had an intricate map. He had grown up in everything I had ever read in a history book about the complex beauty and horrors of the South for Black people. We could just talk about things, and that talking eventually evolved into art making. Walter was not an artist as I know artists, but he was an incredibly creative and willing human being.

He became an avatar of myself as an old Black man in a particular history and time. We also took the work to a place that felt very speculative and futuristic, almost sci-fi. On some level, he understood all of that but from a different kind of body-politic point of view, beyond just being Black. It was an incredibly generative collaboration. When he passed away, I continued working with his family. They continued to play with what Walter and I had begun, and we’re showing a lot of that video work as part of 1856 Cessna Road at PS1.

How did you approach assembling the work for your show at MoMA PS1?

The show is not something I necessarily wanted. I find having a show in a big institution a real challenge because a lot of the work is intimate and wasn’t meant to be seen by an audience. At the end of the day, it’s an institution—there’s a certain common logic to what that is and what it might mean for me to enter a space like that. Questions that have come up are: Who’s the audience? How does an audience view what it is we’re doing?

The exhibition includes Rant redux, based on your collaboration with Kevin Beasley. How did that begin?

Kevin was a student at Yale, and I did a studio visit. He had two turntables in the corner, and he played a piece sampling dead rappers [I Want My Spot Back, 2011–12] that was the most haunting thing I had ever heard. I invited Kevin to play it for a series of dances at MoMA that I was curating, and our collaboration has grown since. Rant redux is a four-channel installation with material shot from Rant #3, a performance we did at the Kitchen [in February 2020]. It felt like an opportunity to see how this work could evolve beyond what it was as a live performance.

Do you consider your work in terms of institutional critique?

As private and as intimate as I want the work to be, it won’t exist without institutional tension. Institutional support becomes generative material. It’s something I get to argue with, transgress, refuse, try to be seen and unseen, and I find those useful tactics. As an artist, I have to have a conversation with institutional structures. They hold the work. They frame the work. I could say no. But in saying yes, there is the opportunity for something else to happen, for the work to have a different relationship with an institution and within my own practice.

Your contribution to the 2022 Whitney Biennial was unusual for you in that it focused mainly on drawing. Did you consider it a sort of performance too?

Adrienne Edwards [one of the Biennial’s curators, along with David Breslin] and I thought about doing a survey of drawings, and showing one series a month. When she sent me [plans] of the architecture that they wanted to use, I got to tweak it so that it felt more conducive to the series that I was sharing. It was a way for me to experiment with showing private work and see if it was going to get violated in that massive art-viewing situation. It was a way for me to not show everything while showing a lot. I enjoyed that not everyone saw everything, except for the guards, the installers, and the docents. It was a conceptual strategy for me to have a conversation with Adrienne and the institution, and a more private conversation with myself about how much I could share at that point in time.

In the end, did you feel like the work was violated by the context, or were you able to maintain intimacy and privacy?

During the show and afterward, I felt anxious about it. But now, two years later, I feel like I won. I got more out of it than the institution. It’s not about refusal. It’s just about my trying to get at that thing that’s very much a part of my practice, which is: How do you maintain what’s important about the work, that thing about the work that can’t really be shared?

Your work features in the Alvin Ailey exhibition at the Whitney. What does Ailey mean to you?

I could make an argument about him being a kind of Walter: a figurehead who represents a generational Blackness and Black culture that is and has been very important for me to confront, love, argue with, and [use to] help me navigate my own practice around the kind of made-up, emphatic history that these people represent to me. I was invited to do a work for the Ailey II company in 1987. I remember wanting to make sure that there would not be any dancing that showed hyper technique. I was wondering how I could make a work with no virtuosity.

Did you see your work as being in dialogue with Ailey then?

Ailey’s work wasn’t available to me when I came to modernist and postmodernist performance. By the time I became aware of his work, it felt foreign to what I was doing. I was a Meredith Monk and Merce Cunningham child, from a movement point of view. I thought to be abstract was the most beautiful way to think about art-making with my Black body. I also had a wonderful collaborative company of dancers, who were all white. I think back, and that’s interesting, and not at all wrong—it’s just what I needed to do and how I needed to work at that point in time. Then, with the Geography Trilogy, the work became only about bodies of color, and I’ve not gone back.
I’ve been Black and known that all my life. Now I’m choosing a way to make work that feels very infinite and/or capacious just about Blackness, what it is and isn’t, and how it feels. This infinite way of being in my body and in the world is something I feel like I can do for the rest of my life.