a blog about Ralph Lemon

Ralph Lemon is many things, visual artist, choreographer, historian, lecturer, and his work occupies many spaces. His work is as personal as it is academic, as rooted in revolution and the black experience as it is a conversation with dominate culture.

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Ralph Lemon: (the efflorescence of) Walter

The artist/dancer describes a conceptual art project featuring the oldest man in Yazoo City Miss.

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A Look at Ralph Lemon's How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?

Take a quick look back at the Ralph Lemon's Walker Commission "How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?" from September 2010 featuring a br...

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More Info

Ralph Lemon has been dancing since the late 70′s. He graduated with a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1975, and began dancing with the Nancy Hauser Dance Company, whose work was influenced by Hanya Holm. Lemon also worked with Meredith Monk in New York City. 

Eventually Lemon created the Ralph Lemon Dance Company which disbanded after ten years in 1995. This marked a shift in Lemon’s work. He started working on larger projects that were cross disciplinary. In 2004 he created Geography Trilogy which is a multimedia work that discusses the experience of Asian, African, and Black American experience throughout the Southeastern part of the United States. Lemon traveled through the American south and met former blues musicians and their descendants. These interviews served to inform his work. All three parts of Geography Trilogy had a collaborative component to them.Whether by Lemon interviewing blues musicians, or going to parts of Africa or Asia, and creating dialogues with other persons, histories, ways of moving, Lemon’s work is an active conversation, in which audience members, gallery patrons are invited to sit in on. 

This is very clear in Lemon’s work  (the efflorescence of) Walter. This work chronicles an 8 year relationship that Lemon had with a elderly black man in Little Yazoo, Mississippi named Walter Carter who Lemon met while doing research. The project consists of various scores that Lemon and Carter created, installations, drawings, text, mixed media. This work asks the fundamental question of what is the artist’s role in society, and shows us a way in which we can remove some of the hierarchy and inaccessibility of art. 

Lemon is significant to dance history not only because of the interdisciplinary nature of his work, but also because of how his work breaks down the barriers between dominate institutions and communities that are traditionally unwelcome in those institutions. His work incites questions that artists in the 21st century should ask, about accessibility, hierarchy, community, documentation, and history.