Ralph Lemon’s work needs a museum—and a retrospective—to do it justice. And this is exactly what the 72-year-old MacArthur “genius” awardee has got with “Ceremonies Out of the Air,” at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City until late March. The exhibition spans a decade, a whole floor, and the disciplines of dance, video, installation, drawings, photography, sculpture, painting, and embodied word (what the artist teasingly calls “rants”). Whatever the medium, Lemon proceeds allusively and elusively, unravelling a constantly fraying thread of association. The drawings are charming, colorful, homegrown, and crowded. The assemblages and sculptures are at once regal and cast-off—treasured detritus. The performances scale peaks of near-comic emotional extremity. The dancing is dangerously headlong. All of it, as this African-American Renaissance man recently told Gia Kourlas of The New York Times, is as “vitally on the margins” as Black culture itself. The exhibition marks its opening with the New York premiere of Tell It Anyway, for 12 luminaries of the downtown dance scene. Over the course of four months, a full calendar of artist talks, reenacted installations, and premiering dances run alongside the gallery offerings. —Apollinaire Scherr