The Brooklyn Rail

Curated by Adrienne Edwards, Edges of Ailey is more than a survey of Alvin Ailey’s output. It is a comprehensive view of the associative artistic appendages that relate Ailey to visual artists as varied as Robert Duncanson, Thornton Dial, Norman Lewis, Beauford Delaney, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Carrie Mae Weems, and Purvis Young, to name but a few. Works by these and approximately eighty other artists are positioned in a series of aisles before a multi-screen wall panel of performance footage from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT). In an impressive feat of studied archival research, the exhibition also collates ephemera from the Allan Gray Family Personal Papers of Alvin Ailey and the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, thematically connecting the paintings, sculptures, and installations to Ailey’s diary entries, choreography notes, correspondence, and photographs. Where the show traipses beyond the nexus of Ailey’s dance practice, veering into sociopolitical genealogies relevant to African-American cultural history as a whole—threading William H. Johnson’s midnight-purple depictions of the Harlem Renaissance, Bill Traylor’s scrawled figures and adumbrated houses, Sam Gilliam’s hard-edge striped corner paintings, or Ellen Gallagher's afrofuturist nautical mythos of Black Atlantis—it is the archival material that brings us back to Ailey.

At times, we are guided by the Ailey’s diaristic notes. A loose leaf sheet, dated “1980,” is marked by the handwritten words “NERVOUS Breakdown.” This indexes Ailey’s public mental health lapse. The incident, which prompted Ailey’s psychiatric treatment and “manic-depressive” diagnosis, prefigured the choreography of Au Bord du Précipice for the Paris Opera Ballet in 1983. The performance is marked by a well-known theatrical trope—the genius-artist prodded into isolation and decay. In Edwards’s curation, this moment in Ailey’s life is connected to Rashid Johnson’s painting, Untitled Anxious Men (2016). The ceramic tile, black soap, and wax work depicts a frenzied charcoal-black face. Two elliptical eyes and a rectangular mouth, clawed agape by thick, fang-liked teeth, are haphazardly scratched in white, incised into the eponymous “anxious” man's visage. Other connections are more strictly biographical. For example, an undated page from Ailey’s notebook reads “MET ASPIRING PAINTER,” under which Ailey has jotted “James Little,” followed by the painter’s address. To the left is, fittingly, Little’s oil and wax on linen painting, Stars and Stripes (2021), the depicted six-pointed star painted in silver-smoke diagonal stripes and layered in brick-like fashion.

The exhibition is divided into multiple sections: “Blackness in Dance,” “Black Southern Imaginary,” “Black Spirituality,” “Black Liberation,” “Black Women,” “Ailey's Collaborators,” “Black Music,” “Ailey's Influences,” and “After Ailey.” Some works, like Karon Davis’s plaster sculpture, Dear Mama (2024), belong to more than one category. The sculpture depicts Ailey’s muse, Judith Jamison, dancing in Cry (1971), which Ailey choreographed as a birthday present for his mother and dedicated to “all Black women everywhere—especially our mothers.” Other inclusions, however, like Robert S. Duncanson’s landscape painting, View of Cincinnati, Ohio from Covington Kentucky (ca. 1851), are more obliquely related to the aforementioned categories, suggesting the presence of an unnamed but all-pervasive heading: “Blood Memories.” Indeed, this unspoken category illuminates the curatorial choice to moor the show in cultural influences that often move beyond the confines of Ailey’s life.

Edwards’s curation is conditioned by Ailey’s interest in the genealogical method as an artistic-diagnostic tool for choreography—one that allows percipients to appreciate how a concept that is embedded in evolving social practices, like worship, can be symbolized by bodily movements. In Thomas Grimm's film, “An Evening with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater” (1986), Ailey first proffers the notion of “blood memories” when he alludes to his best-known choreography, Revelations (1960), remarking that:

The first ballets [that I choreographed] were ballets about my black roots. I lived in Texas … until I was 12 … so I have lots of what I call blood memories … about Texas, blues and spirituals and gospel music, ragtime music … folk songs, work songs—all that kind of thing that was going on in Texas in the early 'thirties, the Depression years. And I had very intense feelings about all those things. So the first ballets that I made when I came to New York were based on those feelings … all of this is a part of my blood memory: my uncles, my family, my mothers, all were in these churches … very intense, very personal.

Relatedly, in Alvin Ailey: An American Visionary (1996), Ailey is quoted as saying:

I am a choreographer. I am a black man whose roots are in the sun and dirt of the south. My roots are in the blues, in the street people whose lives are full of beauty and misery and pain and hope. My roots are also in the Gospel church, the Gospel church of the south where I grew up. Holy blues, paeons to joy, anthems to the human spirit.

These remarks clarify the consequence of paintings like Clementine Hunter’s Cane River Baptism (ca. 1950–56) and Palmer Hayden’s Spirituals (Dreams) (ca. 1935), both of which delineate the Baptist context of African-American Christianity in the American South. Viewing such works, one cannot help but appreciate Hunter’s congregation in their dancerly winding trail, the animated bodies darting along the church’s courtyard. Ailey's memories of communal African-American life, subtended by the context of the True Vine Baptist church services of his youth in Rogers, Texas, deeply informed the theatrical lexicon of ballets like Blues Suite (1958), Revelations (1960), Roots of the Blues (1961), Masekela Langage (1969), and Cry (1971). Blues Suite was particularly inventive in its dovetailing sultry bordello images with palpably emotional fragments of worship. Although only about half of the paintings on view are figurative, a significant number depict the epochal context preceding and succeeding the Great Migration, during which Ailey moved with his mother from Texas to Los Angeles.

Although Ailey’s concept of “blood memories” is tethered to his African-American Southern roots, the Whitney exhibition is not delimited to this exact context. Instead, it posits Ailey as a central node within the broader arc of African-American modernism—ranging from music to literature to the plastic arts. In her exhibition catalog essay, Adrienne Edwards writes:

In Mr. Ailey, as a figure, we see a range of various oppressions comingled and our need for these injustices to be identified and acknowledged, because in understanding and specifying the full dimensions of his life, we can better know the intersecting complexities embodied in his dances, their shaping presence. This is to say that we need to speak of Mr. Ailey in the genealogy of Black gay people before and alongside him, from figures in the Harlem Renaissance, especially Hughes; to the civil rights era, including Baldwin, Hansberry, and Bayard Rustin; to the creative scene of the 1980s with Julius Eastman, Essex Hemphill, and Marlon Riggs.

The idiom of jazz is a particularly important mode of “shaping presence.” Ailey’s Blues Suite and House of Flowers punctuate slow movement with Martha Graham-influenced contractions, allegro jumps, and cavorting eruptions, demonstrating the importance of “bebop” and “hard bop” jazz’s cadence. In “Life with Alvin: A Kansas City Story” (1966), author Allan S. Gray, long-term friends with Ailey, reflects that, “It was jazz that gave him the vocabulary to describe the unique experiences of African Americans.” This is evident in Ailey's For 'Bird'—With Love (1984), the choreographer’s tribute to Charlie “Bird” Parker, and Night Creature (1974), a piece commissioned on the occasion of a CBS television special on Duke Ellington. This context informs the exhibition’s inclusion of Lewis’s Phantasy II (1946) and Sam Gilliam’s Swing 64 (1964). Both artists render jazz’s syncopation optical, albeit in nearly opposed abstract modes—Lewis’s Kandinsky-influenced variegated field of thinly delineated and partially submerged triangles and circles is much looser than Gilliam’s hard-edge geometric abstraction, where thick, evenly-spaced russet, navy, tangerine, and amethyst lines are neatly arranged in nested right angles.

Other genealogical threads veer away from the painterly, towards the idiomatic and symbolic. Consider, for instance, Maren Hassinger’s mixed-media installation, River (1972/2012)—which intertwines woven ropes and metal chains into a serpentine river of bondage artifacts—and Lonnie Holley’s Sharing the Struggle (2018), where two undusted wooden rocking chairs are shawled in alabaster fire hose coils, stiles and legs almost entirely constricted. Here, despite the absence of bodies, we are privy to motility and the technological apparatuses of African enslavement. This latter theme, of the slave narrative, is further underscored by the inclusion of Kara Walker’s well-known linoleum cut silhouette, African/American (1998).

The inclusion is of the self-taught artists Purvis Young and Bill Traylor is a bit most curious. After his emancipation in 1865, Traylor, like Ailey’s parents during the choreographer’s early years, was employed as a sharecropper, though the idiosyncrasies of Traylor’s exhibited work, Untitled (Man in a Blue House) (n.d.)—like most of his work—outstrips his biography. One wonders if Young and Traylor’s inclusion is due to Ailey’s putative status as a “self-taught” dancer? Indeed, it is often said that, because he began dancing in an epoch predating BFA and MFA dance programs, Ailey was “largely self-taught.” Ailey began pursuing dance after having joined his mother in Los Angeles, where she had travelled in 1942 to work as a welder at Lockheed. Ailey’s first contact with concert dance was in the mid-1940s, when he saw Katherine Dunham's African-American modern company and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo perform. Ailey’s modernist-jazz synthesis was only furthered by his exposure to Jack Cole’s Magdalena: A Musical Adventure at the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera. Ailey then studied tap dance in high school with Thelma Robinson before, in 1949, taking courses with Lester Horton’s studio. It is from this context of dance erudition that Ailey developed the sinuous movement that he, from the earliest of his choreographies, honed in a modernist manner.

Yet Young and Traylor are not modernists. One might argue that, throughout their work, Young and Traylor depict the human figure—often fogged and bleary—within a Southern “folk art” vernacular or environmental semblance. Ultimately, the historical context of the African-American South is integral to Ailey’s concept of “blood memories,” though it cannot be argued that Young and Traylor’s self-contained visual lexicon relates to Ailey’s sharp, modernist choreography. As the title suggests, “Edges of Ailey” traipses on the edges, sometimes relegating Ailey’s actual dance practice and choreography to peripheral glances. Nevertheless, the inextricable context of African-American modernism, as a thorough-going epochal phenomena emerging out of the Great Migration and hence critical to understanding Ailey’s formation, work, and legacy, is never far from view.