Whitney Biennial 2022: 
Quiet as It’s Kept

Floor 5

Born 1952 in Cincinnati, OH
Lives in Brooklyn, NY

An interdisciplinary artist who works primarily in performance, Ralph Lemon has made drawings throughout most of his creative life. He has described the purpose of these works, which have been constant and mostly private, as “a mapping akin to an anthropological practice,” involving research and art making in places such as Japan, Haiti, Côte d’Ivoire and, for many years, the Mississippi Delta. For the Biennial, he has developed a choreography of presentation, exhibiting hundreds of drawings from the past twenty-five years in five transient variations that unfold over the course of the exhibition. Elsewhere in the Museum, a single work is displayed that is also altered during the exhibition. Themes range from elaborate visual meditations and the nature of the artistic process itself to experiments refracting Black American culture, icons, music, and joy.