ZSC

Percival Everett’s essay, noitcartsba, on abstraction in the Whitney Biennial 2022 catalog made me think about your forthcoming show, Edges of Ailey. He writes that abstract painting’s “only limit might be the range of visible colors or the edges of the canvas.” Can you tell me about the origin of the show’s title?

AE

The title is trying to indicate Mr. Ailey as a threshold or portal. When I started this project six years ago, I wasn’t coming across any deep understandings of who he was as a person. Since then, there has been an amazing documentary, Ailey, (2021) by Jamila Wignot, but excepting Thomas DeFrantz's book, Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture, (2004) there was not a lot of thinking that sits with his works deeply, in the way I feel our show does. We could have easily done a show on the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT), which he founded in 1958, but I wanted to inquire into who he was as an individual and showcase it.

ZSC

Your first show at the Whitney, Jason Moran, originated at the Walker Art Center and was the artist’s first museum show. That show, in a lot of ways, reflects your practice as someone interested in the meeting of performance, museum curation, and visual arts.

AE

Exhibitions can function as artworks or art installations themselves. With Jason Moran, rather than working in singularities of subject, object, (or even lens), I wanted to think more expansively about the artist as a precipice. These were the questions behind Jason Moran’s show, the My Barbarian exhibition, Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Side, and in some ways, Dave McKenzie: The Story I Tell Myself. I am always interested in testing out new ideas around showmaking. At this point in my career, I’ve worked with artists on over 50 commissions, and I’ve focused on art and performance coming from a specific interdisciplinary context as well as a tradition that’s oriented to the visual arts. Of course, performance incorporates music, dance, and theater, but I have rarely worked in any one of those disciplines in isolation. Edges of Ailey, in many ways, is a culmination of that trajectory. The show crystallizes how I’ve been working for a while now.

In terms of incorporating performance programming and visual art, “Edges of Ailey” occurs on two levels: the in-gallery and in-theater portions. The performance program is happening mostly during the museum’s opening hours so that visitors can see the show and a performance on the same day. Spaces are tight and will be in demand undoubtedly, but the exhibition is on our fifth floor, which is 18,000 square feet. We are showing performances almost every single week during the show’s run.

ZSC

When you come off the elevator into the galleries, you encounter this striking environment of red platforms and walls. Why red?

AE

There are three reasons. Firstly, Mr. Ailey often used the phrase “blood memories” to speak about his work and the Southern soulfulness he grew up with. Small churches in the South, particularly Black churches, often have a red carpet and red pews. I also wanted to indicate the performing arts centers in which we usually encounter his work—the red of the seats and curtains. In addition to the red islands and walls, we also have red sheers on the windows.

In terms of moving through the space, I wanted the galleries to be open enough to allow for a cross-viewing experience. There are loose categorizations of the works, but with a cross-room glance, you can make the connective tissue that brings everything together. We have three different systems of display; cables running from floor to ceiling to suspend works, half-walls, and custom pyramid structures that are made to hold large-scale paintings. We were inspired by Mr. Ailey’s dance, Archipelago, to create small custom-made islands to hold works organized by the themes that we found most resonant in Mr. Ailey’s choreography.

ZSC

Some of those categorizations are Southern Imaginary, Black Migration, Ailey’s Influences, and Ailey’s Collaborators. Can you tell me about the process of arriving at these themes?

AE

The categorizations of the works are loose and gesture towards the overlapping relationality between specific art pieces. Southern Imaginary is as much about the American South as it is about the Caribbean, as it is about Brazil, as it is about the Western coast of Africa; it’s a different way to speak of the diaspora. Some works are related to direct collaborations that Ailey had with visual artists such as Romare Bearden, and others hold space for Mr. Ailey’s preoccupations and interests. For example, he had a deep relationship with and wrote a lot about James Baldwin, so Glenn Ligon’s “Stranger in the Village” series is a way to index and hold Baldwin in space. It’s paired with some pages from Mr. Ailey’s notebooks where he’s writing about Baldwin to show this conversation between the three artists.

What became very clear to me in making this show is that the themes we were working with were also resonant to a huge swath of Black artists. We have 82 contributing artists. The earliest work is a painting by Robert Duncanson from 1851, and the most recent are five works being made on the occasion of the show itself. Several artists, such as Mickalene Thomas, Karon Davis, Jennifer Packer, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, all decided they wanted to make new work for the show. We open with a beautiful painting, “Ocean,” by Purvis Young, an artist from Florida. Water was a significant theme for Ailey—not just in terms of rivers and oceans and the Middle Passage, but also in terms of ablutions, how we cleanse ourselves, save ourselves, and spiritually reset ourselves.

ZSC

You mentioned Robert Duncanson’s 1851 painting. How does that piece fit into the show?

AE

Duncanson’s piece, “View of Cincinnati, Ohio from Covington, Kentucky,” sits in our section devoted to Black Liberation. In 1851, freedom for Black people was contingent upon where they stood in relation to this line, a clearing, a vista that Duncanson makes between a free and slaveholding state. There’s an illustration by Thomas Nast from an 1863 edition of Harper’s Weekly published on the occasion of the emancipation of Black people. And then there’s a medallion that was engraved by Meta Vaux Warwick Fuller, an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman. Together, they constellate the historical ground of Black liberation, what was wagered, and what Ailey continues to explore conceptually and somatically in his dances.

ZSC

What were your precedents in dance exhibition-making? What makes it different?

AE

Dance exhibitions are unusual and difficult because it's incredibly challenging to replicate the unique experience of seeing and sensing a body and its movement as you would in a live performance. Shows about dance have tended to fall into two camps: the Lincoln Kirstein camp, which is all about ballet, and the Judson Dance Theater camp, and those adjacent to it, including Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, and Yvonne Rainer—all have received a lot of love in museum contexts. When I looked at these ballet or experimental movement-based shows of a conceptual tradition in the ’60s and ’70s, I kept asking myself, “well, why not Ailey?” When this idea came to me six years ago, I thought, “there must just not be enough material to do this show, or else obviously someone would’ve already made it.” There hadn’t been deep scholarly attention to Ailey’s work since Tommy DeFrantz’s dissertation out of NYU, which was published almost twenty years ago. I followed that question and went into the archive.

ZSC

What were you hoping to find?

AE

I had hunches and expectations about what I might find, but it was completely different to be inside Ailey’s archive. At the same time, it supported and gave me license to follow my initial instincts. When we first looked at the foundation’s archive, I realized that Mr. Ailey split his holdings at the time of his death. A tranche of material went to the foundation, which is now at the Library of Congress. He gave his personal holdings to a friend and supporter of his work, Allan Gray, in Kansas City. We looked into these two central archives, and eight others. The personal archives were such a revelation, no pun intended, because the material became a blueprint for the show.

Part of what I discovered in that process was that the spirit of “the artist as threshold” lent itself very naturally to Ailey. I tried to track his influences through his notebooks and got this deeply complex picture of Ailey’s choreography. In interviews, he called dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham expressionless and in his notebooks, he would note the elements of Cunningham’s work that he wanted to incorporate. He was constantly indexing and lifting from the world around him. Some of that archival material will be incorporated into the show. For example, I’m pairing one of Rashid Johnson’s earliest “Anxious Men,” pieces alongside a page in Ailey’s journal that just reads: “1980, seven weeks, hospitalized, nervous breakdown.” The archival vitrines hold his notebooks, personal holdings, and ephemera, as well as the choreographic notes he took down in diaries during tours to Southeast Asia, Russia, and Africa. In showing archival material, we have to be really careful with the light levels in the space. We have such large windows in the gallery and that also influences our choices spatially–where we’re closest to the windows we can only do reproductions of archival material.

ZSC

You also have a section devoted to Ailey’s influences.

AE

Katherine Dunham, Lester Horton, Pearl Primus, Maya Deren, and Talley Beatty are all there. The ballet is obviously a preoccupation of his, but he’s also influenced by Martha Graham and Ted Shawn. You can track his interest in that work through the archive and discover that he had this deep correspondence with Ted Shawn, which I hadn’t expected. Then you have Jack Cole, who’s doing a lot of dancing and choreography for Hollywood. There’s just this deep well that was hiding in plain sight.

ZSC

In his biography, Revelations, Ailey describes the ecstasy of seeing Katherine Dunham perform for the first time.

AE

Absolutely. She was hugely impactful for him. It was the first performance he saw when he was a teenager in Los Angeles in the late ’40s. In the photographs from the studio during his lifetime, you see multiple portraits of her on the wall and no one else. She became this goddess figure for the Ailey company in many ways. Obviously, Lester Horton was also hugely important for Ailey. A way to think about Ailey and the arc of his work is through his unfolding across different dance styles. I walked away from this, realizing this man’s curiosity was truly profound. Even the literary figures he read are surprising. Of course, he was reading James Baldwin, Albert Murray, and Langston Hughes, but he was also reading Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams, and TS Eliot. He was writing short stories and poetry that no one ever saw. Those pieces will be shown for the first time. The process of making this show really meant grappling with who he was, what he was interested in, and tending to him very closely.

ZSC

What was it like to work through scholarship and dance criticism of the time? In thinking about the archive, what sources were supporting or failing you?

AE

There’s some amazing scholarship that has been done over the years coming out of dance studies, like Tommy DeFrantz, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Susan Manning, and Zita Allen. They have done some of the most perceptive writing on his work and laid a really beautiful bedrock for understanding Ailey and the context in which he evolved and what was happening in concert dance. I also taught a graduate school class at CUNY with Claire Bishop based on Ailey’s work. In some ways, we needed to do a lot of the work of building out the fullness of his context and influences, which is to say, his creative mind. For me, this is the power of Ailey–that a dance exhibition would also have to be an exhibition about cultural history. The way he worked and showed up in the world was always always multivalent. He gave us more work to do.

ZSC

How did engaging the archive change how you wanted to situate the work for an audience?

AE

It reinforced and guided my initial instincts. I had to trust my hope that visitors would see the space between the dances he choreographed and bridge the dances that were shown. While it was important for me to activate parts of the archive I was cognizant of intentionally leaving space for interpretation and resonance. “Revelations” and “Cry,” are well-known dances, but we were also interested in “The Lark Ascending,” one of his abstract dances he called his “plotless dances.” Despite criticism, he remained committed to showcasing his more abstract work. Critics at that time wanted work that was indexical and signifying Blackness in a specific way. It’s interesting how he both works with that criticism and pushes against it.

ZSC

What was the process like of writing on Ailey while curating him?

AE

The hard part was deciding what to write. There was writing I wanted to do as a scholar and the writing I wanted to do as the curator who imagined and put this show together. I needed to figure out how I could do both. Ultimately, I wanted to sit with Ailey as this threshold and that threshold worked both ways–in terms of those who came before him, and made it possible for him to arrive to dance, and then the people he influenced, some of whom were his contemporaries.

There hasn’t been a book on Ailey in twenty years, so the exhibition catalog has been an incredible opportunity to get a lot of new writing out on him and his practice. We have a group of interdisciplinary scholars and public intellectuals in writing and in conversation. They had a lot of freedom in terms of how they wanted to think about his legacy. I asked Ariel Osterweis to take on virtuosity and J Wortham to meditate on water. It was also important for me to have someone to think about Ailey in relationship to queerness, which Uri McMillan took to task beautifully. I had conversations with Artistic Director Emeriti Judith Jamison, Masazumi Chaya, and Sylvia Waters, and we’re publishing sections from Ailey’s personal archive for the first time. There’s a full chronology of his life and all of his choreography as well as the artworks present in this show. Early on, I understood that I couldn’t create a platform for this person and the magnitude of his career by myself. I knew that the book would be much more compelling as an assembly of voices.

ZSC

Spatially, this may be a different conversation, but in terms of your own curiosity, how do you know where to stop curatorially? What to occlude?

AE

So much of it, Zora, is instinctual. I’ve learned a lot along the way, like that I don’t have the right to bore people. When I’m making a show, I am thinking about dazzling them. I don’t want a show to be full of white walls. I want it to feel very intentional. I like that this show is essentially a soundtrack–a lot of different things have to happen in the space that will be unusual for people in order for us to land the work (and its concepts). There’s a multimedia installation, these incredible works of art, the intimacy of the archival materials, and Ailey’s voice coming in and out speaking about what was important to him. It’s like keying up an orchestra. It takes a great sensitivity to attend to each of these aspects as characters brought together to amplify one another.