Myths, Legends, and Spectacle: Masks and Puppets of Ralph Lee
Myths, Legends, and Spectacle: Masks and Puppets of Ralph Lee
Participating Artist: Ralph Lee
Curator: Matthew Sorensen
Gallery: Abrazo Interno Gallery
Dates: August 9th - August 31st, 2023
Opening Reception: August 9th, 2023, 4:30-9pm
The International Puppet Fringe Festival, New York’s only international fringe festival dedicated to puppetry, returns August 9th, 2023, Organized by Teatro SEA, Grupo Morán (The Morán Group) and The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural & Education Center.
As part of the festival, IPFF presents two special exhibitions of Ralph Lee’s work featuring important art pieces from the recent exhibition at the Ballard Institute Museum of Puppetry and rare photographic records of important moments in Mr. Lee’s career.
For over sixty years, Ralph Lee has combined his knowledge of masks, puppets, movement, and performance to create stunning works of theater, dance, puppetry, parade, and spectacle. His work has delighted and inspired audiences off and on Broadway, in the streets and public spaces of New York City, and in innumerable outdoor locales across the Northeast. An avid puppeteer as a child, Ralph studied dance, theater and mime as well as the design and construction of masks, puppets, and sets. Leaping into the New York performance world of the early 1960s, he built masks for theater and dance productions, was a member of the avant-garde Open Theater, and invented the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. In 1976, he joined the Mettawee River Theatre Company, transforming it into a traveling puppet theater which explores myths, legend, trickster tales, and folklore from many world cultures. In this exhibition, you can see how Ralph Lee’s compelling masks and puppets express the essential nature of the creatures, characters, demons, and deities of productions, opening wide a window of understanding into the richness of human beliefs and stories.
