Isabela Ferreira: "Ralph Lemon: From Out of Space"

The Edmund Pettus Bridge is empty. A man in a period suit walks slowly across it, carrying a stack of thrift store records. He stumbles. The records scatter. He gathers them up and keeps walking. The video runs for seven minutes and 42 seconds and it is one of the most quietly devastating works currently on view in New York City.

From Out of Space, on view through April 11, 2026, at Paula Cooper Gallery at 521 West 21st Street in New York, is a focused and profoundly moving exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Ralph Lemon. It follows his acclaimed 20 year survey, Ceremonies Out of the Air, recently presented at MoMA PS1, and brings together photographs and videos made between 2001 and 2021 that emerge from Lemon’s extended engagement with the history and afterlives of the civil rights movement in the American South.

The exhibition is rooted in research Lemon conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when he traveled extensively through the southern United States, retracing the routes of the Freedom Bus Rides on their 40th anniversary and documenting historically charged sites with a 35mm camera. Small gelatin silver prints from this period line the gallery walls with the quiet intensity of evidence: photographs of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, the home of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, and the grocery store in Money, Mississippi, where 14-year-old Emmett Till was accused of whistling at a white woman in 1955.

In 2018, Lemon returned to Money, Mississippi and photographed the continuously decaying grocery store. The building’s owner has repeatedly blocked efforts to preserve or memorialize the site, and the photographs register this slow, deliberate erasure with remarkable restraint. Alongside these, the title video work From Out of Space (2018 to 2021), filmed in part with drone footage by videographer Louis Sparre, hovers above the collapsing structures and the nearby Tallahatchie River in a silent meditation on what history leaves behind and what it allows to disappear. 

Lemon does not aestheticize grief. The photographs are plainly made, the video deliberately unhurried. The formal choices are inseparable from the ethical ones. What the exhibition asks, with great patience and seriousness, is what it means to witness, and what it means to return.

Paula Cooper Gallery presents the work with the care and attentiveness it requires. From Out of Space is an exhibition that stays with you well after you leave the room.