The artist’s longtime project on Emmett Till jogs the memory of America’s racist past
Though this modestly sized exhibition offers only a glimpse of Ralph Lemon’s wide-ranging practice – omitting any of his sculptures, drawings, paintings or dance performances – its 13 solemn black-and-white photographs and three short, single-channel videos reveal his artistry in subtler ways. Many of these works focus on sites in the Mississippi Delta connected to the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Chicago. Rather than dramatising that incident, they record some of its physical traces – architecturally what remains. Formal commemoration at these sites has been challenging. It wasn’t until 2005 that metal placards with historical information started to go up, but these signs have been repeatedly vandalised or stolen – several of them soon after they were installed. The Trump administration is currently considering removing the markers altogether.
In 2002 and again in 2018, Lemon photographed Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi, where a white woman accused Till of flirting with her. Both photographs are untitled in the exhibition. In 2018 Lemon also photographed the barn where the woman’s husband and brother tortured and shot Till (Untitled [Barn, Drew, Mississippi]); the Tallahatchie River, where they dumped him after (Untitled [Tallahatchie River, Mississippi]); and two views of the funeral home that held his disfigured body before his mother succeeded in getting it back to Chicago, where she put it on view in an open coffin (both Untitled [Funeral Home, Tutwiler, Mississippi]). The show’s titular four-and-a-half-minute video (2018–21) and the photographs matter-of-factly depicting the now largely dilapidated buildings bear some resemblance to Dawoud Bey’s landscape photographs and films (2017–23), in which he portrayed plantations, paths to slave markets and escape routes on the Underground Railroad. Yet while Bey’s images of tangled underbrush and perfectly intact period architecture make history feel palpable, Lemon’s boarded-up windows and roofs reduced to loose piles suggest the past slipping away. In one of the images, Untitled (Funeral Home, Tutwiler, Mississippi) (2018), where the mortuary used to be, a car, likely a hearse, is stuck in a mound of dirt, crumbled brick and trash. The car’s parts have joined with an earthy mix rising like water all around.
Lemon was making his work on Till before and after Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016) brought widespread criticism to the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where it was displayed. Schutz, who is white, was accused of aestheticising and exploiting atrocity and Black suffering. Lemon is Black and born in Cincinnati, just north of what is considered the South; his works about Till create a notably spare atmosphere. It would be tempting to claim that the photographs and video are a memorial, but they feel more like an exercise to jog the memory, as if Lemon is trying to understand them by going through them multiple times, as a detective might go back through a case file in search of something overlooked. From Out of Space shows closeups of wood ceilings and walls, presumably in the barn where Till was killed, and drone footage of the Tallahatchie and Bryant’s, a police car with lights flashing stationed nearby. The second time the river appears in the video, the water’s barely disturbed surface takes up the whole screen, pushed vertically for a breathless 15 seconds. Due to high levels of clay and silt sediment, the river is a pink-brown colour, like skin. In spite of racists who have tried – and will continue to try – to erase history, or perhaps in part because of them, if one looks long enough in Mississippi, Till becomes larger, more fundamental and elemental, like water. Lemon lingers in the ruins and carries history forward without sensationalising or overmonumentalising it, even as its material markers and traces fade and disappear.
Ralph Lemon: From Out of Space was at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 26 February – 11 April
