Artists & Projects Directory
Ralph Lemon/Cross Performance
The Memory Project is a two-week workshop that
stimulates young people to explore their homes, families, and local myths and
stories as materials for their own works of art. Exercises in listening,
annotation, journal-writing, photography and collage-making help participants
become more aware of their own histories, and thereby understand more about
their present lives. The workshop grew out of Ralph Lemon's research in Mississippi as he
developed Come home Charley Patton (2000-2004). During this time, Lemon met
Clementine Davis at the Oakes African American Cultural Center in Yazoo City
and Jimmy Holmes at the Blue Front Café in Bentonia. Both spoke of the need for
young black Mississippians to learn more about their history and culture-not
from lectures or books but experientially-and both perceived the potential
educational value in Lemon's research method. After successfully piloting the
workshops in Yazoo City, Cross Performance has offered them in New York City, Minneapolis,
and Chicago and Urbana, IL.
Practice of Form is a multi-day research lab
that investigates how a daily personal practice and creative process inform an
outcome and form; and how, through an open and guided discussion, the nature of
form holds infinite possibilities of meaning. The questions of the group become
the workshop methodology, as inquiry creates practice and practice facilitates
a refinement of the questions. Participants may grapple with questions such as:
"How does the creative practice in general, and humanity in particular, come to
embody the memory of historical events or processes, thus acting as a
meditative interface between memory and history?" The work begins with the body
and a practical study of the body as cultural language, as place, as memory, as
a virtual and digital image, and as architecture.