SCAFFOLD ROOM Begins Tonight at The Kitchen

The Kitchen is pleased to present the New York Premiere of Scaffold Room in an expanded format created by choreographer, director and conceptual artist Ralph Lemon. This installation, performance and reading series of seminal, subversive texts refracts ideas and images of the female artist in American pop and contemporary art.

Lemon describes the performance component of Scaffold Room as a "lecture-performance-musical" investigating archetypal black female personae in American culture. Live performances by Okwui Okpokwasili (Bronx Gothic, Julie Taymor's A Midsummer Night's Dream) and April Matthis (Fondly, Collette Richland) are featured alongside video of a rural Mississippi Delta community embodied by 86-year-old Edna Carter and her extended family, with whom Lemon shares a long history. The live performers enact parallel iconic characters that draw from history, popular culture, and science fiction with source materials ranging from Moms Mabley to Amy Winehouse, Kathy Acker to Samuel R. Delany in an investigation of the way in which culture enacts itself through the body.

Scaffold Room includes language sources from some of the most transgressive American writers of the past decades, among them punk poet and experimental novelist Kathy Acker, whose prose examines power dynamics through a lens of explicit, sometimes violent, sexuality; and Samuel R. Delany, whose work embraces futuristic and pornographic themes. Each anticipated ways that human interaction would become more fragmented and intense in the era of social networking and the internet.

Lemon's installation expands upon and elucidates the themes he is exploring in the live performance. The installation of his work includes, drawings and sculptures that are illuminated by a carefully scored by lighting design. Among these new features is a series of his own artist talks and a reading room, in which Yvonne Rainer, Fred Moten, Miguel Gutierrez, Gary Indiana and Tim Griffin will read graphic passages from works of literature that experiment with form and investigate issues of power, sexuality and identity.

In an era where art is being increasingly packaged and commercialized Scaffold Room demands a freedom of expression that disrupts that ineffable play of property, identity and power.

Performances of Scaffold Room will take place tonight, November 3-10 (see above schedule), and Lemon's accompanying installation will be open to the public during gallery hours. Tickets for Scaffold Room performances are $20 ($16 students, seniors) and can be purchased online at thekitchen.org or by phone at 212.255.5793 x11. Please see below for performance and programming schedule. All other events are free to the public.

Scaffold Room is created in collaboration with Kevin Beasley, Jim Findlay, Paul Hamilton, Malcolm Low, April Matthis, Roderick Murray, Naoko Nagata, Okwui Okpokwasili, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Katherine Profeta, Marina Rosenfeld, Mike Taylor and Philip White.

Scaffold Room at The Kitchen is curated and organized by Tim Griffin and Matthew Lyons.

Scaffold Room has been seen in various iterations at Bard College and The Walker Art Center. Claudia LaRocco, writing for Artforum called it "one of the headiest and most beautiful things I've seen in I don't know how long" and Jenn Joy for BOMB Magazine described it as "gorgeous and terrifying."

Ralph Lemon (Creator, Choreographer and Director) is a director, choreographer, writer, visual artist and curator, and the Artistic Director of Cross Performance, a company dedicated to the creation of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary performance and presentation. His most recent works include the innovative dance/film project Four Walls (2012), and How Can You Stay in The House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? (2008-2010), a work with live performance, film and visual art that toured across the U.S. The immersive visual art installation, Meditation, which was part of How Can You Stay..., was purchased for the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center in 2012. In January 2011, a re-imagined section of How Can You Stay... was performed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in conjunction with On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century. Mr. Lemon curated the fall 2012 performance series Some sweet day at MoMA, and the acclaimed 2010 performance series I Get Lost at Danspace Project in NYC.

Mr. Lemon's visual artwork was shown in a group exhibit When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South at the Studio Museum of Harlem (summer 2014). His solo visual art exhibitions include: 1856 Cessna Road at The Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC (2012); How Can You Stay In The House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2010); (the efflorescence of) Walter, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2008), The Kitchen, NYC (2007) and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2006); The Geography Trilogy, Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (2001); and Temples, Margaret Bodell Gallery, NYC (2000). His group exhibitions include: When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination & the American South, The Studio Museum in Harlem; Move: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery, London, UK and The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC. Mr. Lemon's book, Come home Charley Patton, the final in a series documenting The Geography Trilogy, was published in 2013 by Wesleyan University Press.

In 2012, Mr. Lemon was honored with one of the first Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards; he was also one of the first artists to receive the United States Artists Fellowship (2006). He is recipient of two "Bessie" Awards (1986, 2005); two Foundation for Contemporary Art Awards (1986, 2012); two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (2004, 2009); a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship; a 2004 Bellagio Study Center Fellowship; and the 1999 CalArts Alpert Award.

Mr. Lemon has been an IDA Fellow at Stanford University (2009); artist-in-residence at Temple University (2005-06); Miller Endowment Visiting Artist at the Krannert Center (2004); Fellow of the Humanities Council and Program in Theater & Dance at Princeton University (2002); and Associate Artist at Yale Repertory Theatre (1996-2000). For the fall 2011 semester he was a Visiting Critic with the Yale University, School of Art, Sculpture Department. Currently he is the 2013-14 Annenberg Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, where he has curated a series of "performance essays," titled Value Talks.