Edges of Ailey Offers a Once-in-a-Lifetime Exploration of Art, Music, and Dance at The Whitney

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, adjacencies, and enduring legacy of visionary artist and choreographer Alvin Ailey. 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. Presented in three parts, Edges of Ailey consists of an immersive exhibition in the Museum’s 18,000 square-foot fifth-floor galleries, an ambitious suite of performances in the Museum’s third-floor Theater, and an accompanying scholarly catalogue.

The exhibition centers on the man himself, capturing the full range of Ailey’s passions, curiosities, and creativity revealed in his archives, across his dances, and within a continuum of other artists spanning nearly two centuries. These elements form a historical account, provide a constellatory survey, and unfold as a tribute to the legendary artist’s life, career, and far-reaching impact on the histories of dance, Black creativity, and American culture. Edges of Ailey affirms the artist’s place as one of the most culturally and historically significant artistic figures in the United States and the world.

“Following six years of dreaming, planning, and researching, the extravaganza that is Edges of Ailey finally enters the world,” said Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs. “Throughout this process, we have had the gift of Mr. Ailey’s guidance, available to us in his notebooks, interviews, dances, and by the way he did things, to which we have kept very close, and which has shaped every aspect of this show. Until now, there have been many exhibitions in art museums about dance but none about Ailey, a true icon and unquestionably deserving subject. Now audiences will have the chance to know his story. It is no small task to hold someone’s legacy of this cultural magnitude in your hands. We have made something that aims to have the same imagination, sparkle, generosity, rigor, and daring as did he.”

Edges of Ailey was developed through extensive archival research. From the sweeping holdings of performance footage, recorded interviews, notebooks, letters, choreographic notes, and drawings, to other ephemera gathered from nearly 10 sources, the archives 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 Edwards. This film is composed of newly digitized performance documentation, dances made for the camera, animated archival images, televised broadcasts, and contextual footage of cultural, social, political, and social events of the time. Visitors also encounter intimate displays of never-before-seen selections from Ailey’s personal archive, providing a foundation for understanding everything from his daily routine and artistic thinking to the demands of touring and his grappling with being gay. Ailey’s short stories and poems are shown publicly and reproduced in the catalogue for the first time.

The ways Ailey appears in the show through archives form a surround, circling the galleries, which are presented in red: walls, an archipelago of elevated platforms, customized systems of display, and curtains. This staging of deep crimson reflects Ailey’s formative “blood memories” as well as the color of theater curtains and seating of the proscenium theaters in which Ailey’s dances are typically performed, and the pews and carpets of many Southern Black churches.

Ailey’s presence, through the video surround and his encased personal effects, envelops and thus contextualizes the selection of artworks by over 80 artists that speak to the parallel, pertinent, and often inseparable concerns of Black creativity in the United States, spanning before the Civil War up to the present. Ailey remarked: “I wanted to paint. I made watercolors. I wanted to sculpt. I wrote poetry. I wanted to write the great American novel,” and described his dances as “movements full of images.” Following keen interest in the visual arts, the artworks on view include painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, video, collage, and photography made before, during, and after Ailey’s lifetime, with many directly connected to the choreographer while others amplify the most persistent subjects of his life and dances.

The exhibition is arranged thematically into sections that 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.

Throughout the presentation of Edges of Ailey, a robust live performance program in the Museum’s third-floor Theater will accompany the in-gallery component. The performance series is inspired, motivated, and organized to reflect Ailey’s commitment to building a platform for Black modern dancers and choreographers. The performances feature all facets of the AILEY organization in residency at the Whitney for one week each month, for a total of five weeks. This gives visitors the opportunity to experience the full scope of Ailey’s world and legacy, including performances of classic and contemporary works by the two repertory companies, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ailey II, as well as showcases by students from The Ailey School, and workshops, classes, and education programs from the Ailey Extension program. During the weeks AILEY is not in residence at the Museum, a series of dance commissions by leading choreographers and their collaborators is presented, including Trajal Harrell, Bill T. Jones, Ralph Lemon with interdisciplinary artist Kevin Beasley, Sarah Michelson, Okwui Okpokwasili with Peter Born, Will Rawls, Matthew Rushing, Yusha-Marie Sorzano, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar.

“Edges of Ailey is one of—if not the—most ambitious and complex exhibitions undertaken in the Whitney’s history,” said Scott Rothkopf, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney. “Now is Ailey’s time and our time as an art museum to recognize his immense creative force not simply as one of the 20th century’s greatest American choreographers, nor as its greatest Black choreographer, but as one of the greatest artists working in any medium anywhere in the world. This exhibition situates Ailey—and those he drew on and inspired—smack in the middle of the avant-garde, right where they belong. In so doing, it pressures and even redefines the trajectory of art history by making it contend with stories and forms it had once ignored. Ailey, quite simply, forged a capacious new mode for ‘expressing the Black experience,’ as he put it, and to share this legacy with our visitors is an honor.”

Edges of Ailey will be at the Whitney September 25, 2024 – February 9, 2025. Tickets are on sale now at whitney.org

Edges of Ailey (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025). Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art; Photo by Natasha Moustache.