Ralph Lemon

The Alvin Ailey exhibit at the Whitney introduced me to to Ralph Lemon, an African American artist with no apparent boundaries.  "On Black Music, a notebook of his line drawings offered a window into his creative process, which includes keeping a daily visual journal based on other sources, including photos of news events, performances and art. 

 

Lemon, a year older than I, then combines them into collage-like works with the tongue-in-cheek goal of depicting "(The greatest [Black] art history story ever told."  He completed this one in 2022; there are probably a dozen more hanging, some bigger than others, in one gallery. As part of "Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon," MoMA PS1 will invite several writers and artists to interpret these jam-packed works.  Great idea.

He ripped at least one image from the headlines.  No doubt the next four years will provide a landslide of traumatic material from our borders.

Drawing may have been his first love but Lemon, who grew up in Ohio and attended the University of Minnesota, embraced movement as another form of artistic expression. He describes this video, created with Kevin Beasley as "a very loud site-specific sound movement voice, Brown/Black body cultural experiment in rage, freedom and or ecstasy." It was filmed in 2020 shortly before the covid 19 pandemic began.

Lennon calls an array of wooden statues clothed in outfits inspired by Beyonce and Jay Z "Consecration of Ancestor Figures."  Known as a frequent collaborator, Lemon borrowed several of the statues from Robert Wilson.  They were carved in West Africa in the mid-20th century, with the installation connecting generations of Black royalty across time.

You may recognize Queen Bey's outfit on this one from the "Apeshit" video the Carters filmed in the Louvre.

A guard stopped me from taking video of the ancestor figures, but there was no prohibition against shooting a couple of other works, including an animated drawing of James Baldwin (who was born a century ago this past August) that rightfully treats him as an oracular figure.  Lemon shows no such respect for Bruce Nauman who seems to personify the white male art establishment of 60s, the same one that cried "foul" when Philip Guston began exhibiting his "hood paintings."

Lemon uses what he calls "mandalas" to decompress from his Black history project, painting objects that often inspire contemplation from both the natural and spiritual worlds. Prolific hardly begins to describe his artistic output.

Untitled 10 by Ralph Lemon (2022)

There's a sculptural component, too, which I find a little baffling.  It includes "The Spaceship #1," which he built in 2007.

And a new work, called "Godhead under the kitchen table"(2024).

He sets the table with "Hippo Head" 

. . . and "Hamburger and plate."  Weird.  But always interesting.  Kind of like Mike Kelley, if Kelley were a choreographer, too.