Edges of Ailey is the first large-scale museum exhibition to reflect on the life, work and legacy of the visionary artist Alvin Ailey. Ailey founded his eponymous dance company in 1958, creating a platform for modern dance through his innovative repertoire and the unflinching support of other dancers and choreographers. His creative pursuits even extended far beyond dance.
"I wanted to paint. I made watercolors. I wanted to sculpt. I wrote poetry. I wanted to write the great American novel," he said.
This multimedia cross-disciplinary exhibition—presented in the museum’s 18,000+ square-foot fifth-floor galleries—brings together painting, sculpture, photography, drawings, print, and video made before, during, and after the artist's lifetime (1931-1989). It crystallizes his incredible influence on the contemporary art world and establishes him as one of the great polymaths and earliest, most celebrated multi-hyphenates of the 20th century.
The exhibition's artworks are assembled thematically around the most persistent ideas in Alvin's choreography—namely, a Southern imaginary spanning the American South, Brazil, the Caribbean and West Africa; Black spirituality from candomblé and vodou to the Black Baptist and Pentecostal traditions; the conditions that instigated the experience of Black migration to the Western and Northern United States; the necessity for and resilience of an intersectional Black liberation; the prominence of Black women in Ailey’s life and work; the remarkable breadth, innovation and experimentation of Black music and the myriad forms of Blackness in dance. Seen together for the first time, the exhibition portrays artworks and ideas that have been an enduring inspiration for Black artists for nearly two centuries.
See it from September 25, 2024-February 9, 2025 at The Whitney.