Ralph Lemon's 'From Out of Space' Brings History into Focus

Aerial view via drone of the crumbling Bryant's Grocery in Ralph Lemon's From Out of Space video. Photo credit: Mary Lapides

By Mary Lapides

I attended the opening of multidisciplinary artist Ralph Lemon’s exhibition, From Out of Space, at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York with a sense of anticipation. I knew this body of work emerged from his time in the Mississippi Delta—places like Drew, Tutwiler, and Money—landscapes that are not abstract to me, but are deeply connected to the work we do at the Emmett Till Interpretive Center. This work was shaped in part by his time spent there with our executive director, Patrick Weems. Representing the Interpretive Center’s Board of Directors, I expected the exhibition to be moving. I wasn’t fully prepared for how devastatingly beautiful the works would be.

The gallery itself was spare with low lighting and made you feel you wanted to examine every detail. I met Lemon briefly there—he was gentle, unassuming, and generous in a way that immediately shaped how I perceived the show. Nothing felt overstated. Instead, everything asked for attention in a quiet way, calling us to witness these remainders of history.

The gelatin silver prints stayed with me the longest. Bryant’s Grocery, photographed around 2002, has continued to fall in on itself. In his video, we see aerial views of the grocery, its structure carrying the weight of time and history. Nearby, the funeral home in Tutwiler appears collapsed into ruin, its form barely holding. The site of Moses Wright’s church is reduced to a pile of debris, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape. I found myself moving slowly between the images, then stopping, then returning. There is a stillness in these images that feels almost fragile, as if they might recede into the land itself.

What I kept returning to was the tension between presence and absence. These places are diminished, altered, or nearly gone—but they are not empty. Their histories feel concentrated rather than erased. The ruin does not obscure the history—it sharpens it and brings it into focus.

That feeling deepened in the next room. I wasn’t prepared for the scale of Lemon’s video, From Out of Space, from which the show takes its name. Projected large across the gallery wall, it transforms these quiet, weathered sites into something immersive and inescapable. The dilapidated Tutwiler Funeral Home, its hearse visible, was startling to see in large scale—its decay visible, but its role in holding memory still palpable. Drone footage moves slowly over Bryant’s Grocery, the Tallahatchie River, and then shifts inside the Barn in Drew, rendered with a clarity that feels almost too intimate. The image is blown up so large and so precise that every beam, every trace makes it hard to ignore its gravity and depravity in the murder of Emmett Till.

At a certain point, the experience began to feel like a kind of call and response—like a church hymn, but this was between artist and history. The images call out, quietly but insistently, and I found myself responding not with words but with attention, with stillness. I became aware of how long I was willing to stand there and look, becoming another witness to history.

I couldn’t separate what I was seeing from the present moment. There is so much right now that feels like erasure—of history, of truth, of accountability. Lemon’s work moves in the opposite direction. He enlarges these spaces, insists on their visibility, and in doing so refuses that erasure.