The Arthur Ross Gallery has appointed acclaimed artist Ralph Lemon the David Evans Family Artist-in-Residence for summer 2026, and will give a public lecture-performance with support from the Department of Fine Arts. Lemon will conduct research exploring architectural shadows, as subtext and invisibility, drawing on the Penn Libraries’ collections and the architecture of Frank Furness’s landmark Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library building. He also will advise on a new and evolving series of future artistic commissions.
The eight-week residency will culminate in a public lecture-performance on Friday, September 18, 2026, from 6:00 to 8:00pm at the Kleinman Energy Forum on the fourth floor of the Fisher Fine Arts Library. The event is free and open to the public.
The project is co-curated by Emily Zimmerman, director of exhibitions and curatorial affairs at the Arthur Ross Gallery, and Cole Akers, curator and associate director of special projects at The Glass House museum in Connecticut.
The residency opens the research phase of a multi-year artistic initiative organized by the Arthur Ross Gallery, commissioning three contemporary artists to create new, site-responsive works inspired by the Fisher Fine Arts Library building. The multidisciplinary commissioned works across dance, sound, and visual art will begin development in the spring of 2027.
“We are delighted to welcome an artist of such profound vision to engage with the history of the Fisher Fine Arts Library and to open the questions that will guide this series of commissions in dialogue with the Furness building,” Zimmerman says. “This building was once home to the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Penn Museum, and in the 1960s it served as an artistic hearth on campus. The series will invite in new audiences, and those who know it well to see the building anew.”
The residency and lecture-performance are realized in partnership with the Weitzman School of Design’s Department of Fine Arts and its new Penn Performance Studio. Lemon was the Keith L. and Kathy Sachs Visiting Professor at Weitzman during the 2018 – 2019 academic year.
Lemon’s residency continues his decades-long practice of research-driven, cross-disciplinary art making, in which choreography, writing, drawing, and performance operate as porous and interdependent forms.
Designed by the American architect Frank Furness and completed in 1891, the library is one of Philadelphia’s most significant 19th-century buildings, a masterwork of Victorian High Gothic design that fuses industrial materials, bold color, and expressive structural logic. The building, located at the heart of Penn’s campus on College Green, currently is undergoing a 20-month exterior restoration to be completed this fall.
Lemon has spent more than four decades working across choreography, writing, drawing, and performance. He founded the Ralph Lemon Dance Company in 1985 and led it for a decade before pursuing long-form, research-driven projects, a turn that reshaped his practice and helped redefine the terms of postmodern performance in New York. In the years since, his work has moved fluidly between the stage, the museum, and the page, earning him recognition as one of the essential American artists of his generation.
Works by Lemon are in important public collections such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Currently he is a visual arts mentor at Columbia University School of the Arts. He has held fellowships and residencies at Yale University, Stanford University, Brown University, Temple University, Princeton University, the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Among his many awards, Lemon received a 2020 MacArthur “Genius” Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 2022 he won the Bucksbaum Award for his work included in that year’s Whitney Biennial, and in 2024 he was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Lemon received a 2015 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. He is a 2018 recipient of the Heinz Family Foundation Award, and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. Lemon was honored with one of the first Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards (2012); he was also one of the first artists to receive the United States Artists Fellowship (2006).
The David Evans Family Artist-in-Residence program at the Arthur Ross Gallery is made possible by the generous support of Penn alum David Evans. He earned his MBA at Penn’s Wharton School in 1970 and received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Muskingum College in 2008. After retiring from an investment career, he partnered in real estate development and historic home renovations.
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