Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present a selection of works by Ralph Lemon from 2001 to 2025, encompassing drawing, painting, photography, and video. The exhibition marks the artist’s first one-person exhibition at the gallery, following Ceremonies Out of the Air, his critically acclaimed survey at MoMA PS1 in 2024.

Ralph Lemon (b. 1952) is a multidisciplinary artist, the founder of the Ralph Lemon Dance Company (1985-1995), and one of the most significant figures to emerge from New York’s postmodern performance scene in the last 30 years. Lemon has long garnered accolades for his multifaceted practice, pushing the boundaries of performance to include installation art, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, film and video. He is the author of The Geography Trilogy, (1997, 2000 and 2004), a three-part compendium of performances, writings, scores, drawings, and photographs surveying three continents and addressing history, race, and the power of memory. He had one-person exhibitions at The Kitchen (2007), the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008) and the Studio Museum in Harlem (2012), and was included in MoMA’s Performance Exhibition Series, a program of live performance in conjunction with the exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2011). The museum published the artist’s first monograph, Ralph Lemon, by Thomas J. Lax (2016).