RALPH LEMON

Ralph Lemon (b. 1952) is a multidisciplinary artist and a leading figure to emerge from New York’s postmodern performance scene. His expansive practice extends performance to encompass installation, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and video. He is the author of The Geography Trilogy (1997, 2000, 2004), a three-part compendium of performances, writings, scores, drawings, and photographs engaging questions of history, race, and memory across three continents.

Lemon has had one-person exhibitions at The Kitchen (2007), the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (2008), and the Studio Museum in Harlem (2012), and participated in MoMA’s Performance Exhibition Series in conjunction with On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2011). MoMA published his first monograph, Ralph Lemon, by Thomas J. Lax, in 2016. In 2024-2025, he was the subject of a 20-year survey, Ceremonies Out of the Air, curated by Connie Butler and Thomas J. Lax at MoMA PS1.

Works by Lemon are held in major public collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He has held fellowships and residencies at institutions including Yale, Stanford, Brown, Princeton, the University of Illinois, and MoMA, and serves as a Visual Arts Mentor at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Lemon’s honors include a United States Artists Fellowship (2006), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award (2012), three Bessie Awards, two Foundation for Contemporary Art Awards, the National Medal of Arts (2015), a MacArthur Fellowship (2020), the Bucksbaum Award at the Whitney Biennial (2022), and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2024). He lives and works in New York and Philadelphia.

Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery.