Edges of Ailey
25 Sep 2024 - 09 Feb 2025
Installation view of Edges of Ailey (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025). Mickalene Thomas, Katherine Dunham: Revelation, 2024. Photograph by David Tufino
Installation view of Edges of Ailey (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025). Benny Andrews, The Way to the Promised Land (Revival Series), 1994. Photograph by David Tufino
Installation view of Edges of Ailey (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025). From left to right: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Fly Trap, 2024; Purvis Young, Love Dance, 1991. Photograph by Jason Lowrie/BFA.com. © BFA 2024
Installation view of Edges of Ailey (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025). Photograph by Jason Lowrie/BFA.com. © BFA 2024
Installation view of Edges of Ailey (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025). Photograph by Jason Lowrie/BFA.com. © BFA 2024
Installation view of Edges of Ailey (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025). Alma Thomas, Mars Dust, 1972. Photograph by Jason Lowrie/BFA.com. © BFA 2024
Installation view of Edges of Ailey (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025). Photograph by Jason Lowrie/BFA.com. © BFA 2024
Installation view of Edges of Ailey (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025). From left to right: John Outterbridge, The Elder, Ethnic Heritage Series, 1979; Jennifer Packer, Not Yet Titled, 2024; Eldren Bailey, Dancers, 1960s; Richmond Barthé, African Dancer, 1933. Photograph by Natasha Moustache
Installation view of Edges of Ailey (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,
September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025). From left to right: Roy DeCarava, Elvin Jones, 1961; Lyle Ashton Harris, Billie #21, 2002; Hale Aspacio Woodruff, Blind Musician, 1935/1998; Norman Lewis, Jazz, 1943–44; Gordon Parks, Music-That Lordly Power, 1993. Photograph by Natasha Moustache
September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025). From left to right: Roy DeCarava, Elvin Jones, 1961; Lyle Ashton Harris, Billie #21, 2002; Hale Aspacio Woodruff, Blind Musician, 1935/1998; Norman Lewis, Jazz, 1943–44; Gordon Parks, Music-That Lordly Power, 1993. Photograph by Natasha Moustache
Installation view of Edges of Ailey (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025). Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, A Knave Made Manifest, 2024. Photograph by Jason Lowrie/BFA.com. © BFA 2024
Edges of Ailey, opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art on September 25, is the first large-scale museum exhibition to celebrate the life, dances, influences, and enduring legacy of visionary artist and choreographer Alvin Ailey (b. 1931, Rogers, Texas; d. 1989, New York, New York). This dynamic showcase—described as an “extravaganza” by curator Adrienne Edwards—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.
Presented at the Museum in two parts, Edges of Ailey consists of an immersive exhibition in the Museum’s 18,000 square-foot fifth-floor galleries—featuring works by more than eighty artists and revelatory archival material—and an ambitious suite of performances in the Museum’s third-floor theater, including AILEY in residence for one week each month during the exhibition.
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 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.
Artists exhibited among Ailey include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, Alma Thomas, Jacob Lawrence, Rashid Johnson, Kevin Beasley, Kara Walker, and many others. A recent acquisition of Eldren Bailey and new works by Karon Davis, Jennifer Packer, Mickalene Thomas, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye will be presented for the first time in honor of this landmark exhibition.
The exhibition is curated by Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs, with Joshua Lubin-Levy, Curatorial Research Associate, and CJ Salapare, Curatorial Assistant.
Presented at the Museum in two parts, Edges of Ailey consists of an immersive exhibition in the Museum’s 18,000 square-foot fifth-floor galleries—featuring works by more than eighty artists and revelatory archival material—and an ambitious suite of performances in the Museum’s third-floor theater, including AILEY in residence for one week each month during the exhibition.
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 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.
Artists exhibited among Ailey include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, Alma Thomas, Jacob Lawrence, Rashid Johnson, Kevin Beasley, Kara Walker, and many others. A recent acquisition of Eldren Bailey and new works by Karon Davis, Jennifer Packer, Mickalene Thomas, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye will be presented for the first time in honor of this landmark exhibition.
The exhibition is curated by Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs, with Joshua Lubin-Levy, Curatorial Research Associate, and CJ Salapare, Curatorial Assistant.