Ralph Lemon is a choreographer, writer, visual artist, and curator, as well as the Artistic Director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. For his public artist talk, Lemon will present a meditation on the body, race, art making, and the Civil Rights Movement, instigated by his engagement with Bruce Nauman's iconic work Wall/Floor Positions (1968).

Lemon is the 2018 Josep Lluis Sert Practitioner in the Arts at the Carpenter Center, and will lead workshops with students on Apr 6 and 7. If you are a student and would like to participate, please visit here, or email ccva@fas.harvard.edu. 

Ralph Lemon

Lemon’s most recent works include Scaffold Room (2015), Four Walls (2012), and How Can You Stay in The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere? (2008-2010), a works with live performance, film and visual art that toured throughout the U.S. The immersive visual art installation, Meditation, which was part of How Can You Stay, was acquired for the permanent collection of the Walker Arts Center in 2012.  In January 2011, a re-imagined section of How Can You Stay was per-formed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in conjunction with On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century.  Mr. Lemon curated the fall 2012 performance series Some sweet day at MOMA, and the acclaimed 2010 performance series I Get Lost at Danspace Project in NYC. 

His solo visual art exhibitions include: 1856 Cessna Road at Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC (2012); How Can You Stay In The House All Day And Not Go Anywhere?, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2010); (the efflorescence of) Walter, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008), The Kitchen, NYC (2007) and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2006); The Geography Trilogy, Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (2001); and Temples, Margaret Bodell Gallery, NYC (2000).  His group exhibitions include: Move: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery, London, UK and The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC. 

In 2012, Mr. Lemon was honored with one of the first Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards; he was also one of the first artists to receive the United States Artists Fellowship (2006).  He is recipient of three "Bessie" Awards (1986, 2005, 2016); two Foundation for Contemporary Art Awards (1986, 2012); two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (2004, 2009); a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship; a 2004 Bellagio Study Center Fellowship; and the 1999 CalArts Alpert Award.  Among his many teaching positions, Mr. Lemon has been an IDA Fellow at Stanford University (2009); artist-in-residence at Temple University (2005-06); Miller Endowment Visiting Artist at the Krannert Center (2004); Fellow of the Humanities Council and Program in Theater & Dance at Princeton University (2002); and Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre (1996-2000).

For the fall 2011 semester he was a Visiting Critic with the Yale University, School of Art, Sculpture Dept. He was the 2014 Annenberg Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, where he curated a series of “performance essays,” titled, Value Talks. In 2015 he was a Mellon Foundation Visiting Artist Fellow at Columbia University. He is currently Professor of Practice of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University; and a Visual Arts Mentor at Columbia University School of the Arts. His book, Come home Charley Patton, the final in a series documenting The Geography Trilogy, was published in 2013 by Wesleyan University Press. He was short-listed for the 2016 Guggenheim Hugo Boss Prize and received a 2015 National Medal of Arts from president, Barack Obama. The first monograph of his work was published by The Museum Of Modern Art (part of their new Modern Dance Series) in 2016.

Josep Lluis Sert Practitioner in the Arts

The Josep Lluis Sert Practitioner is an annual invitation to a distinguished artist to spend several days in residence at the Carpenter Center, engaged with students and other members of the academic community in a variety of possible activities. Founded in 1986 the program is supported by a generous gift of the late Robert Gardner, former director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, director of the Film Study Center, and chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. The residency includes both close engagement with a small group of students (acting in a collaborative way) and also some occasion open to a larger invited group of faculty, students, and the general public. This larger occasion includes a lecture-demonstration, talk, or rehearsal-performance, depending on both the art and practices involved, and the wishes of the Practitioner.