until Sunday February 09 2025
Whitney Museum of American Art
T : +1 (212) 570 3600
99 Gansevoort Street
NY 10014 New York
United States
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https://whitney.org
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 (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. Selections from the Alvin Ailey Archival Papers, courtesy of the Allan Gray Family Foundation and held at the Black Archives of Mid America in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation Archives Collection held at the Library of Congress are of singular importance, specially digitized and exhibited for this show’s occasion. A dynamic montage of Ailey’s life and dances plays on loop across an 18-channel video installation created by filmmakers Josh Begley and Kya Lou, with curator Adrienne Edwards.
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.
