Edges of Ailey January 19, 2025

We had wanted to see this exhibition since it opened back in September but life sometimes interferes with art. We finally went last Sunday and we were wowed. 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. It 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  performances in the Museum’s third-floor theater, including AILEY in residence for one week each month during the exhibition. Included are 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 through-line in the gallery. The artworks 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 Basquiat, Romare Bearden (a personal favorite of mine,) Faith Ringgold, Alma Thomas, Jacob Lawrence, Rashid Johnson, Kevin Beasley, Kara Walker and many more. This wonderful exhibit is on through February 9th.