Born into poverty in Texas, and dead at 58 of AIDS, in Manhattan, choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931–1989) surfed the 20th century with big dreams and extraordinary grace and power. Edges of Ailey, open through February 9 at the Whitney Museum, illuminates just about every facet of his life in the arts.
The exhibition is the passion project of Adrienne Edwards, a senior curator at the museum who, like her subject, is Black and gay. The show pays homage to the diverse talents, skills, and interests of a remarkable man, whose enthusiasm for the arts led him to build the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, perhaps the best-known dance institution in the world. What Edwards calls her “motley project” sprawls over 18,000 square feet of gallery space on the fifth floor of the Whitney, packed with paintings and sculpture, posters and documents, small video monitors, and a wraparound video montage that magnetizes viewers with images of Ailey and his many iconic dances. Downstairs, in the third-floor theater, a full program of live performances illustrates the impact of his work on the next generation of Black dance artists.
September’s schedule of grand openings filled the gallery and the lobby with patrons of great beauty, so well turned out as to steal attention from the significant art on display. Former and current members of the company that Ailey founded in 1958 — his inspirations and his spawn — as well as friends, family, and fans, showed up to celebrate the man and his moment.
As an aficionado of Ailey’s work for most of my life, I found the exhibit almost overwhelming. The usually brightly lit gallery is shrouded in deep crimson curtains and filled with music, apparently to create the nightclub atmosphere Ailey cherished and that inspired a lot of his choreography. Artificial light levels are controlled to privilege the wide ribbon of video circling the overhead space, revealing the choreographer and his star performers in full dancing mode but making it awkward, especially after sunset, to fully appreciate the many paintings that deck the walls and the sculpture scattered throughout the room. The works have been chosen to amplify Ailey’s own biography and focus, as well as the era in which he worked, spanning the pre–Civil War South and the civil rights movement. The oldest piece in the show is an 1851 oil painting by Robert Duncanson, featuring an Ohio vista as seen from Kentucky; the newest, a wonderful 2024 drawing by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, features three Black dancers standing perfectly still. Benny Andrews’ oil and collage The Way to the Promised Land (Revival Series) (1994), recalling worshippers in the Baptist church of the artist’s youth in Georgia, shares space with work by such iconic artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence, and Kara Walker. Coiled ominously on the floor along the southern wall of the gallery is River, a length of steel chain and rope (1972, revised in 2011) by California sculptor Maren Hassinger.
The final work, on the gallery’s western wall, is a panel of the AIDS quilt containing a tribute to Ailey, whose condition was kept quiet at the time of his death to spare the feelings of his mother.
Born in rural Rogers, Texas, 11-year-old Ailey was taken to Los Angeles by his mother in 1942. There he met Carmen de Lavallade, already a gifted performer, at his high school; she led him to Lester Horton, a significant regional choreographer who trained Ailey in his technique and, by example, demonstrated the mechanics of running a dance company. When Horton died suddenly, of a heart attack, Ailey took the troupe over. He and de Lavallade, both then in their early twenties, moved to New York to dance on Broadway. Ailey began mining the local creative community, studying ballet and Dunham technique (which combines dance movement from Caribbean and African cultures with European-style ballet), taking classes with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, and finding his vocabulary in a fusion of these systems as well as the Black social dance traditions in which he was raised.
The huge, glorious exhibition catalog contains a series of essays elucidating every aspect of its subject’s life and career; the transcript of an online discussion among his intimates (Judith Jamison, Sylvia Waters, Masazumi Chaya, and curator Edwards); and a transcript of a conversation among artists and critics, reflecting on Ailey’s legacy. Interspersed with writing both theoretical and personal are photos of the company in action all over the world (it toured widely, courtesy of the U.S. State Department) and of Ailey himself, shot by such luminaries as Carl Van Vechten. Full-page reproductions of sections of many of Ailey’s notebooks are easier to parse in the catalog than they are in the gallery; wrapped in gold paper, the five-pound volume is an essential companion to this vital show.
In one essay, scholar Uri McMillan positions Ailey’s choreography in “the glossy halcyon days of disco,” observing that Ailey “understood how the multisensorial environment of the disco produced an ecstatic interplay of the ocular, sonic, and kinesthetic.” Central to the catalog is an invaluable chronology, assembled from biographies by writers Jennifer Dunning and Thomas F. DeFrantz and other sources, which reveals the difficulties and triumphs involved in keeping the company afloat for 68 years. The volume concludes with an index to the text itself, as well as appendices listing all the choreography and everyone who danced it, up until Ailey’s death, in 1989. And, bless their hearts, a list of everyone who works at the Whitney.
Rooms at either end of the huge gallery contain pages from Ailey’s notebooks; videos of performances by the likes of Katherine Dunham and de Lavallade, which shaped the choreographer’s own thinking; and photos of Ailey and many colleagues, as well as a large assemblage of posters and fascinating computerized data sets by scholars Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit that chart, in animated graphic form, all the places the company has performed and all the people who danced Ailey’s work. The final work, on the gallery’s western wall, is the panel of the AIDS quilt containing a tribute to Ailey, whose condition was kept quiet at the time of his death to spare the feelings of his mother, Lula Cooper. The choreographer’s respect for her is evident in his 1971 work Cry, an homage created as a birthday present for Cooper and dedicated “to all Black women everywhere — especially our mothers.” The dance was made for his star dancer, Judith Jamison, who died this month at the age of 81; a visit to the Whitney’s show, in which she’s vitally present in the wraparound video display and other pieces, seems a perfect way to keep her memory alive.
The exhibition offers us not just the “edges” of Ailey — shards of photographs, notes, paintings, and video reflecting the worlds he came from and the things he learned — but also, and especially, his beating heart. ❖
• Member organizations of the present-day Ailey corporation, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ailey II, students from the Ailey School, Ailey Extension, and Ailey Arts in Education, are performing one week a month in the museum’s third-floor theater. Also on view will be the work of other choreographers, including Will Rawls (December 13–15), Sarah Michelson (January 9–11), Jawole Willa Jo Zollar (January 17–19), Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born (February 6–8), and Ralph Lemon and Kevin Beasley (February 7).
•• Artist Julie Mehretu, who is also a Whitney trustee, has made a gift to the museum that will underwrite free admission for all visitors 25 and under, beginning in mid-December.
Edges of Ailey
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street
Through February 9
Elizabeth Zimmer has written about dance, theater, and books for the Village Voice and other publications since 1983. She runs writing workshops for students and professionals across the country, has studied many forms of dance, and has taught in the Hollins University MFA dance program.
