Edges of Ailey is the first large-scale museum exhibition to celebrate the life, dances, influences, and enduring legacy of visionary artist and choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931, Rogers, TX–1989, New York, NY). This dynamic showcase brings together visual art, live performance, music, a range of archival materials, and a multi-screen video installation drawn from recordings of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) repertory to explore the full range of Ailey’s personal and creative life.
Sweeping holdings of rarely seen archives, including performance footage, recorded interviews, notebooks, letters, poems, short stories, choreographic notes, drawings, and performance programs and posters gathered from Ailey’s archives and others forge a vital throughline in the gallery. A dynamic montage of Ailey’s life and dances will play on loop across an 18-channel video installation created by filmmakers Josh Begley and Kya Lou, with exhibition curator Adrienne Edwards.
Ailey’s presence, felt through the video surround and his encased personal effects, envelops a scenic installation of artworks by over eighty artists. These works are arranged by themes that shaped Ailey’s life and dances. Sections span an expanded Black southern imaginary that enfolds histories of the American South with those of the Caribbean, Brazil, and West Africa; the enduring practices of Black spirituality; the profound conditions and effects of Black migration; the resilience for and necessity of an intersectional Black liberation; the prominence of Black women in Ailey’s life; and the robust histories and experiments of Black music; along with the myriad representations of Blackness in dance and meditations on dance after Ailey.
Kara Walker is among the many artists exhibited alongside Ailey, while a recent acquisition by the Whitney of new work by Jennifer Packer will be presented for the first time in honor of this landmark exhibition.
Edges of Ailey is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through February 9. To learn more, click here.