Ralph Lemon is Artistic Director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. Lemon builds teams of collaborating artists - from diverse cultural backgrounds, countries and artistic disciplines - who bring their own history and aesthetic voices to the work. Projects develop over a period of years, with public sharings of work-in-progress, culminating in artworks derived from the artistic, cultural, historic and emotional material uncovered in this rigorous creative research process.
Lemon's most recent work, How Can You Stay In The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere? (2008-2010) was a four-part project consisting of live performance, film, and visual art. The first three parts were presented on stage with a cast of seven and the fourth, Meditation (created with video designer Jim Findlay), was an immersive visual art installation.
The project also included a mixed-media exhibition of works created by Lemon and his long-time collaborator/muse, Walter Carter, a black man from Mississippi whose life spanned the 20th Century. This critically acclaimed work toured to seven cities across the U.S. including Urbana, IL; San Francisco, CA; Minneapolis, MN; Los Angeles, CA; Seattle, WA; Durham, NC; and Brooklyn, NY. In January 2011, a re-contextualized version of one section of the work was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in conjunction with the exhibition, On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century.
Other recent projects include Paradance, a series of performed lectures, which Lemon presented at universities and art centers throughout 2011; an online installation (www.ralphlemon.net); and Rescuing the Princess, a 2009 performance commission for the Lyon Opera Ballet. In 2010, Lemon curated I Get Lost, a performance and humanities series for Danspace Project, New York, NY. In 2005 Lemon concluded The Geography Trilogy - a ten-year project encompassing three full-evening dance/theater works - Geography (1997), Tree (2000), and Come home Charley Patton (2004); two online art projects; three books - geography: art/race/exile, Tree: Belief/Culture/Balance and Come home Charley Patton; several gallery installations featuring video, drawings and photographs; and a three-DVD set with an essay written by project dramaturg, Katherine Profeta.
Lemon's solo visual art exhibitions include: 1856 Cessna Road, Studio Museum in Harlem (2012); How Can You Stay In The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere?, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2010); (the efflorescence of) Walter, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008), The Kitchen, New York (2007) and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2006); The Geography Trilogy, Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (2001); Temples, Margaret Bodell Gallery, New York (2000); and Geography, Art Awareness, Lexington, New York (1997). Group exhibitions include: Move: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2010-11) and The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC.
Lemon is an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Artist Award (2012) and was also one of fifty artists to receive the inaugural United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. He has received two "Bessie" (NY Dance and Performance) Awards, 2009 and 2004 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2004 Fellowship with the Bellagio Study and Conference Center. In 1999, Lemon was honored with the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts.
Lemon has been artist-in-residence at Temple University in Philadelphia (2005-06); George A. Miller Endowment Visiting Artist at the Krannert Center (2004); and a Fellow of the Humanities Council and Program in Theater and Dance at Princeton University (2002). From 1996-2000, he was Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre. In 2009, he was an IDA fellow at Stanford University and in 2011 he was a Visiting Critic with the Yale University, School of Art, Sculpture Department.
Maggie Allesee
