RALPH LEMON AWARDED $250,000 HEINZ AWARD
The American choreographer and visual artist Ralph Lemon—a self-described conceptualist whose work leaps across disciplinary boundaries to test conventions of dance and theater—has been named a recipient of the prestigious $250,000 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities category. During more than four decades of performance-making, Lemon has explored race and memory, as well as experiences of grief and spirituality, through nonhierarchical movement and language.
“Ralph has consistently created art that pushes audiences to think and feel and ponder, both in the midst and in the wake of each performance,” said Teresa Heinz, chairman of the Heinz Family Foundation. “The Heinz Award recognizes the broad and celebrated array of his work in confronting and laying open issues of race, culture, and history through visual and performance art.”
Lemon is currently a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a visual arts mentor at Columbia University. His numerous other honors include the American Choreographers Award, two New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Awards, and the National Medal of Arts, which was bestowed to him by former president Barack Obama in 2015. In 2017, he was a professor in the theater and performance studies department at Brown University.
In 2012, Lemon was curator of the fall performance series “Some sweet day” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, about which he spoke with David Velasco in an interview or artforum.com. “Some people will point to the surface layer and say it doesn’t work,” he said. “And my point is, of course it doesn’t work. Now let’s see, within that, what are the opportunities, what do we discover about it not working? From my point of view, if it’s not working that means it works. We know the old model.”
In a 2014 artforum.com review of Lemon’s play Scaffold Room, Claudia La Rocco wrote that the work “is one of the headiest and most beautiful things I’ve seen in I don’t know how long, and, despite it consisting of huge and complex swaths of language, I find it to be almost entirely, triumphantly resistant to my attempts to find an adequate language for describing or containing it. It’s shot through with grief, and dazzled (troubled?) by the fullness of existence. . . . As far as I can see Lemon is at home everywhere—I mean, his art is. Everywhere and nowhere.”
