On October 3, the Walker Art Center will premiere Rant redux (2020-2024), a four-channel moving image installation created collaboratively by acclaimed choreographer Ralph Lemon and celebrated visual artist Kevin Beasley. For over a decade, Lemon and Beasley have together developed multimedia installations and live performances that compellingly explore Black and Brown experiences and expressions. Rant redux is a powerful and hypnotic encapsulation of their Rant #3 performance, which included artists and performers Okwui Okpokwasili, Samita Sinha, Paul Hamilton, Lysis (Ley), Mariama Noguera-Devers, Dwayne Brown, and Darrell Jones.
The original Rant event brought together collaborators in a rave-like environment at The Kitchen in New York in 2020, to create a frenetic collision of movement and sound. Footage featured in Rant redux captures the live sound mix by Beasley and words shouted by Lemon, drawn from his own writings and those of such writers as Fred Moten, Angela Davis, Kathy Acker, and Saidiya Hartman, while others engage in improvised and synchronized movement. Lemon has described it as “a very loud site-specific sound, movement, voice, Brown/Black body cultural experiment in rage, freedom and/or ecstasy”. Rant redux now offers audiences fresh entrance into the experience, extending its reach and inviting new connection to the sensations and emotions the performance embodied.
Rant redux (2020-2024) will be on short-term view at the Walker, through October 13, to coincide with the debut of Lemon’s new ambitious performance and installation, Tell it anyway, 2024. Commissioned by the Walker and premiering at the institution’s McGuire Theater on October 4 and 5, Tell it anyway, 2024 captures Lemon’s singular multidisciplinary vision, as he explores issues of memory, race, and impermanence with a fury and grace befitting our contemporary moment. Tell it anyway, 2024 engages a diverse cadre of collaborators, including Beasley, Okwui Okpokwasili, April Matthis, Samita Sinha, Darrell Jones, Dwayne Brown, Lysis (Ley), Paul Hamilton, Mariama Nougera-Devers, Angie Pittman, Mike Taylor, and Roderick Murray, to examine these complex and critical subjects through sound, dance, and visual experience.
The presentations of Rant redux and Tell it anyway, 2024 mark a decade since the Walker commissioned, developed, and premiered Lemon’s interdisciplinary work Scaffold Room, an influential and groundbreaking event that brought together performance, visual art, music, and text. The upcoming premieres reflect the Walker’s commitment to Lemon’s pivotal practice and ongoing support for artists through time. The October program also captures the Walker’s distinct approach to creating multidisciplinary experiences for its galleries and theater. Rant redux (2020-2024) is jointly curated by Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy; and Philip Bither, McGuire Director and Senior Curator of Performing Arts, with Doug Benidt, Associate Curator, Performing Arts.
“The Walker has had the great fortune to support Ralph Lemon’s evolving creative practice for nearly three decades, through multiple performance commissions, residencies, installation and digital art presentations, and other influential and compelling projects,” said Philip Bither, Director and Senior Curator, Performing Arts. “Our collaborations have served as a model for creating deep and mutually transformative partnerships between artists and institutions. Ralph’s work surprises and challenges us through intricate and groundbreaking expressions that profoundly speak to our contemporary times. We look forward to engaging audiences once more with the two forthcoming premieres.”
“Nimbly moving across disciplines, media, and platforms—whether in the galleries or on the stage—Ralph Lemon is a luminary figure in the field of interdisciplinary practice,” said Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy. “We are thrilled to celebrate these two premieres that attest to the spirit of experimentation, adventurousness, and friendship that underscore Ralph and Kevin Beasley’s ongoing collaborations and the community of musicians, actors, and dancers that their collaborations galvanize”.
ABOUT RALPH LEMON
Ralph Lemon is a choreographer, writer, and visual artist based in Philadelphia. In November 2024, Lemon’s work will be the subject of a major exhibition at MoMA PS1, titled Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon. His work has also been the subject of exhibitions at The Kitchen (2007/2015), Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008), Studio Museum in Harlem (2012) and the Walker Art Center (2014). At MoMA, he performed in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium for On Line: Drawing in the 20th Century (2010); he organized the performance series Some sweet day (2012); and he led the discursive project Value Talks as an Annenberg Fellow (2013–14). MoMA published the first monograph on his oeuvre, Modern Dance (2016).
Lemon is a recipient of three Bessie Awards (1986, 2005, 2016), two Foundation for Contemporary Art Awards (1986, 2012), a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award (2012). In 2015, he received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. He is a 2018 recipient of the Heinz Family Foundation Award and a 2020 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Lemon won the Bucksbaum Award for his contribution to the 2022 Whitney Biennial. His works are in the permanent collections of institutions including the Walker Art Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art.
ABOUT KEVIN BEASLEY
Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, VA) lives and works in New York. Beasley’s practice spans sculpture, photography, sound, and performance, while centering on materials of cultural and personal significance, from raw cotton harvested from his family’s property in Virginia to sounds gathered using contact microphones. Beasley alters, casts, and molds these diverse materials to form a body of works that acknowledge the complex, shared histories of the broader American experience, steeped in generational memories.
Beasley’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at major institutions across the United States and abroad, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; Studio Museum in Harlem in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Contemporary Art Center in Riga, Latvia; and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among numerous others. His recent performances include Plastic/Soul/Capture/Play – Notes in Public (2024) at the University of Chicago, IL, and Dust (2023) at Counter Public in St. Louis. He has been awarded residencies with A4 Arts Foundation, Delfina Foundation, and the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, among others. Beasley received his BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit in 2007 and his MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2012.
SUPPORT
Tell it anyway, 2024 is commissioned by the Walker, with support provided by the Knox Foundation: Susanne Lilly Hutcheson; Zenas Hutcheson, IV; Henry Hutcheson; and Perrin Hutcheson; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts. Program support provided by Leni and David Moore, Jr./The David and Leni Moore Family Foundation.