This week, MoMA PS1 will present a major exhibition of artist Ralph Lemon (b. 1952, Cincinnati), featuring more than sixty artworks made over the last decade across disciplines and a program of six collaborative performances.
![Ralph Lemon. Untitled 1. 2016. From the series Untitled (The greatest [Black] art history story ever told. Unfinished). Courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Martin Parsekian](https://fadmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/Untitled-GBAHSET_1-2000x1486-1.jpg)
Opening on November 14th, 2024, Ceremonies Out of the Air comprises dance, drawings, photographs, sculpture, paintings, and video throughout the Museum’s expansive third-floor galleries, alongside a synchronous program of live works staged in a dedicated performance space. One of the most significant figures to emerge from New York’s downtown scene in the 1990s, 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.
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. The opening weekend will feature an ensemble presentation of Tell it anyway (2024), commissioned and premiered by the Walker Art Center, and made in collaboration with Beasley, Okpokwasili, Sinha, Jones, April Matthis, Paul Hamilton, Mariama Nougera-Devers, Dwayne Brown, Angie Pittman, Roderick Murray, Mike Taylor, and Lysis (Ley). In spring 2025, a special presentation of Rant #6 will transpose the cinematic suspension of the Rant redux (2020-24) installation back into real-time.
Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon, November 14th, 2024— March 24th, 2025, MoMA PS1
Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon is organized by Connie Butler, Director, MoMA PS1, and Thomas Lax, Curator, Department of Media and Performance, MoMA, with Kari Rittenbach, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1.
About the artist
Ralph Lemon is a choreographer, writer, and visual artist based in Brooklyn and Philadelphia. His work has been the subject of exhibitions at The Kitchen (2007/2015), Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008), Studio Museum in Harlem (2012) and the Walker Art Center (2006, 2014, 2024). At MoMA, he performed in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium for On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2010); he organized the performance series Some sweet day (2012); and he led the discursive project Value Talks as an Annenberg Fellow (2013–14). MoMA published the first monograph on his oeuvre, Ralph Lemon (2016) in the Modern Dance series. Lemon is a recipient of three Bessie Awards (1986, 2005, 2016), two Foundation for Contemporary Art Awards (1986, 2012), a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship and Doris Duke Performing Artist Award (2012). 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 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Lemon won the Bucksbaum Award for his contribution to the 2022 Whitney Biennial. His works are in the permanent collections of institutions including the Walker Art Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
PERFORMANCE PROGRAM
The Ceremonies Out of the Air performance program includes several world and New York City premieres of Lemon’s newest works, which anchor the exhibition’s explorations of generosity, mortality, devotion, Blackness, and joy. All performances are free with RSVP. Tickets are released two weeks prior to each event. For more info and to reserve, visit mo.ma/lemon.
Tell it anyway November 14th and 16th, 2024
The New York premiere of Lemon’s latest performance Tell it anyway opens the exhibition. Lemon and his collaborators weave abstract movement and song lyrics into an explosive examination of memory, race, and impermanence. With music composed by Kevin Beasley, Tell it anyway was commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Performers: Kevin Beasley, Dwayne Brown, Paul Hamilton, Darrell Jones, Ralph Lemon, Lysis (Ley), April Matthis, Mariama Nougera-Devers, Okwui Okpokwasili, Angie Pittman, Samita Sinha, with Timothy Angulo
Untitled (The greatest [Black] art history story ever told. Unfinished), Interpreted
December 14th, 2024 | Daphne Brooks
January 11th, 2025 | Bob Hoffnar
February 15th, 2025 | Will Rawls
March 8th, 2024 | Saidiya Hartman
For these talks, invited guests respond to Ralph Lemon’s narrative epic, Untitled (The greatest [Black] art history story ever told. Unfinished) (2015–), a layered and colorful series of works on paper. Lemon notes the series deals “with charged places, architecture, and people historically and presently, and also in some sort of illusory future, and none of that is going to stop.” Participating artists, writers, theorists, and performers will each read or “interpret” Lemon’s abstract narrative from their distinct point of view.
In Proximity January 16th, 18th, 19*, 2025 *Brass Band only
Originally commissioned for the exhibition Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies at Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana, In Proximity makes its US premiere at MoMA PS1. Developed from Lemon’s research into movement, text, and sound in non-dance spaces, the performance extends his dialogue/argument with the performative sculptural practice of artist Bruce Nauman. The work features an original score and sound design realized in collaboration with Philip White. At MoMA PS1, In Proximity includes a prelude by the Brass Band, who virtuosically abstract music from the New Orleans jazz tradition. Performers: Darrell Jones, Lysis (Ley), Jimena Paz, Samita Sinha Brass Band: Bantu Al-Abu, Warren “Trae” Crudup III, Kalia Vandever, Chris Ryan Williams
Low February 20th and 22nd, 2025
The world premiere of Low marks an unfolding of twenty years of collaboration between Ralph Lemon and dancer Darrell Jones. The duet embodies a physical exploration of the energy that comes after exertion, in the wake of performance—the transition from fury and exhaustion to something beyond. Performers: Ralph Lemon, Darrell Jones.
Ceremonies Out of the Air March 1st, 2025
Ceremonies Out of the Air encompasses an artist talk by Ralph Lemon that concludes several narrative ideas in the films and objects of the Walter Carter Suite, on view in the exhibition. This world premiere features an extended solo performance by dancer Darrell Jones. Performers: Ralph Lemon, Darrell Jones.
Rant #6 March 22nd, 2025 MoMA PS1 presents Rant #6, the latest (and perhaps final) iteration of Ralph Lemon’s collaborative work that debuted in 2019. Each performance is conceived as what Lemon calls “a very loud site-specific sound, movement, voice, Brown/Black body cultural experiment in rage, freedom and or ecstasy…”In Rant #6, voice, text, and trance movement collide into a whirlwind of exhaustion and emphatic resistance. Performers: Kevin Beasley, Dwayne Brown, Paul Hamilton, Darrell Jones, Ralph Lemon, Lysis (Ley), Mariama Noguera-Devers, Okwui Okpokwasili, Angie Pittman, Samita Sinha, and invited guests.
