The Whitney Museum of American Art
After six years of laborious preparation, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents Edges of Ailey. On view until February 9, the exhibition honors the life, legacy, work, and influences of choreographer and performer Alvin Ailey (1931 – 1989), who made an indelible mark on the New York City art landscape and American culture writ large. Curator Adrienne Edwards, a former dancer herself, has aimed to dissolve the boundary between performing and visual arts with Edges of Ailey. The multidisciplinary exhibition addresses the issue of centering an ephemeral medium, dance, in the gallery space.
Edges of Ailey, composed of painting, sculpture, recorded interviews, video installations, letters, poems, short stories, choreographic notes, drawings, and performance programs, is dense and highly varied. Many of Ailey’s own works– audiovisual installations featuring his choreography and intimate, handwritten testimonials– are on display, as are pieces by his idols, his collaborators, and the contemporary artists who’ve drawn inspiration from his singular precedent. As Edwards asserts, to know Ailey’s “constellation of influences,” which range from fellow choreographer Martha Graham to literary giant James Baldwin, is to know the man himself. In this way, Edges of Ailey situates Ailey not only in the history of dance, but also in the history of American culture itself. The exhibition also functions as a chronicle of Black creativity in the United States; subsections of the exhibition like “Black Liberation” and “Black Migration” feature multidisciplinary works by Black artists spanning the twentieth and twenty-first century and celebrate Ailey’s unyielding commitment to equity and antiracism. The exhibition’s curatorial team eschewed a chronological organization, opting instead to group pieces with thematic commonalities under headings like the Southern Imaginary, Black Migration, and Black Liberation. Each subheading represents a chapter of Ailey’s personal life entwined intimately with his work as a performer and choreographer. (The theme of Black Women, for example, is spoken for in the exhibition by pieces like Geoffrey Holder’s Portrait of Carmen de Lavallade (1976) and Ailey’s 1971 choreography entitled Cry, a birthday gift to his beloved mother.)
In preparation for curatorial work, Edwards pored over Ailey’s personal notebooks and testimonials, which were entrusted after Ailey’s passing to Allan Gray, a longtime friend of the choreographer’s at the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City. In her words, they reveal a “mind at work,” a restless creative spirit reckoning with the range of human emotions– grief, joy, anguish, anxiety, and desire amongst them. In this way, Edges of Ailey zooms in and out in order to paint a holistic picture of its honoree. The exhibition examines the most intimate facets of his oeuvre as well as the broader culture by which he was shaped (and upon which he eventually left his own fingerprint). Music plays a predictably significant role in Edges of Ailey; a memorable score accompanies the sprawling, mural-like installation that wraps around the gallery space, and familiar melodies by the likes of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone are foregrounded in the exhibition’s “Black Music” subsection. The dancer motif surfaces myriad times throughout the exhibition, allusions to Ailey and the community of creatives with whom he spent his life. It manifests in works like “Judith Jamison as Josephine Baker” (1985) by Emma Amos, and Lynette Yiadom Boakye’s “A Knave Made Manifest” (2024); the latter, along with a handful of other paintings, was commissioned on the occasion of the exhibition.
As Holland Cotter, art critic and senior writer at the New York Times, highlighted in a recent review, it’s rare for a space as “historically object-intensive” as a museum to foreground an intangible medium. Dance has long been entwined with the visual arts but is often relegated to the periphery of institutions like the Whitney; Edges of Ailey grants it a lead role. A program of frequent live performances by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, based a few dozen blocks uptown in midtown west, complement the static elements of the exhibition, and videos of Ailey’s choreography animate the space during the lulls between said performances. Movement, with respect to dance and migration alike, serves as a thematic through-line. But Edges of Ailey is not an exhibition about dance, in a general sense. It’s a character study, an examination of Alvin Ailey’s illustrious career, and a celebration of multidisciplinary art in all its fluid glory.