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Dancing into History
John Haberin New York City
Alvin Ailey, Art, and Dance
Ralph Lemon and Performance
The largest gallery at the Whitney just got bigger. It has knocked down nearly every wall, leaving a dance theater that Alvin Ailey himself could never have experienced. For a more impressive stage, he would have had to turn to New York itself.
It is also an exhibition space—as capacious, the museum hopes, as African American art. It sees Ailey as a guide to the story of that art, including art that he may never have known. It must sound ridiculous. Who would attempt to tell that story in an exhibition or even two, no more than the story of Western or global art? It risks condescending to black artists by pretending that it can. 
And yet it succeeds, for theater becomes art and art becomes theater, as "Edges of Ailey," while an Ailey veteran, Ralph Lemon, at MoMA PS1 reaches for the stars.
Epic theater
This is epic theater. Works from more than eighty artists, many as large as a human performer, take the spotlight before disappearing into a greater darkness. Some occupy islands within "Edges of Ailey," and you can circulate around and between them. Right off, that knocks out any hope for a chronological exhibition or even a story, but do not despair. The rest line the walls, as you would expect, and articulate the show's themes. Smaller spaces at each end of the floor tell Ailey's own interdisciplinary story.
Born in 1931, he studied with Stella Adler—not a choreographer, but a renowned acting teacher. He acknowledged the influence of Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Duke Ellington, and the show returns often to the Harlem Renaissance, painting and dance, black experience, and music, particularly jazz. He credited Geoffrey Holder as well, a friend who moved easily between the stage and art. Ailey founded the American Dance Theater in 1958, with thirty-two dancers and two directors. There, too, he was thinking of influence, collaboration, and community. He died in 1989 of AIDS.
The show includes publicity posters, playbills, and film clips culled from thousands of hours, and scheduled performance continues downstairs in the museum's theater and on its roof as well. It has color photos of Ailey himself dancing, lingering on not just his movements, but his expressive face. Ailey made the scene in all sorts of ways. The ABT performed at the opening of Studio 54, the epitome of a club scene that would never admit you. And the show's only window overlooks a Hudson River pier that served as a gay pick-up spot. The AIDS quilt bars the view.
Overhead on the show's fantastic stage, choreography, too, lines the walls, in one long video collage spanning eighteen screens. It adds color, like the yellow robes of dancers. It provides a constant background of music, even if you look instead at the art. Mahalia Jackson introduces a work with music by Ellington, barely mentioning Ailey. This is his achievement all the same. It just happens to come down to two distinct exhibitions, for dance and for art.
The show is itself a collaboration, between the Whitney and the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation. Neither is willing to let Ailey's work die with him. Nor are the curators, Adrienne Edwards with Joshua Lubin-Levy. They could have included only art that the choreographer admired or influenced, and perhaps they do. If so, he knew and influenced a lot. And that still leaves open just how present he is in the art.
Right off the elevator, an island for art points to his influence. The Whitney has commissioned portraits of dance by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Jennifer Packer, each a study in movement and color. Also in 2024, Karon Davis renders a dancer in profile in plaster. Its tribute to freedom of motion takes on a spooky fixity in white. Here and elsewhere, the show exceeds Ailey's lifetime. And it dares one to pick out what else does and what does not.
A struggle for beauty
The Whitney sees the same themes as applying to Ailey and to twentieth-century art. Growing up fatherless in rural Texas, he would have seen what Thornton Dial called Shadows of the Field in 2008, and listened to spirituals, like those playing softly at the Whitney. He would have seen makeshift homes like the cabin in the cotton in a painting by Horace Pippin—or constructions in wood scraps like those of Beverly Buchanan well after Ailey's death. 
The Great Migration took him to Harlem for its tombstone houses, its preachers, and its street life—just as it took others in works by Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, and William H. Johnson. All date to before Ailey's maturity.
He loved music, like the song of a choir boy in a photo by James van der Zee. He knew jazz musicians, like Elvin Jones in a photo by Roy DeCarava. He admired black women and black liberation. And he reveled in dance, much like a dancing elder in wood, fabric, and beads by John Outterbridge. The exhibition has room for an entire suite by Romare Bearden, Bayou Fever, full of life but far from Harlem. You will just have to take the Whitney's word for it that abstraction from Sam Gilliam reflects the same rhythms.
If Modernism and contemporary art were not enough, the show throws in a landscape from 1851, a view of Cincinnati by Robert Duncanson. It brings Hudson River School light to a community for black Americans. But then history has a way of getting out of hand, even for Ailey. Who can claim it all, and who would want to try? Where to end and where to begin? Everything about the show rings false, but even its falsity has its rewards in discovery.
That very first island for art has its discoveries. It includes sculpture from Richmond Barthé as far back as 1913. Its video record includes Lorna Simpson in 2011, with pale orange dancers might have come from another dimension. Who knew a woman from Barkley Hendricks in unmoving profile as a dancer—or nylon stockings weighted with sand from Senga Nengud as a dancei? Now, perhaps, you will.
The surprises keep coming. A silhouette by Kara Walker hangs over the iconic Black Woman by Elizabeth Catlett. Manacles by Melvin Edwards speaks of black liberation. And then comes a River of steel chains and rope by Maren Hassinger. Lonnie Holley binds rocking chairs like electric chairs, with fire hoses. This will be one long emergency and one long struggle.
You may still reject the show's premises, or you may see in it what set Ailey apart. The ABT was not half as confrontational as black experience might lead you to expect, for all the "edges" of Ailey. Jerome Robbins in West Side Story and George Balanchine in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue choreographed violence. For Ailey, the African American struggle is a struggle for beauty. A black woman, so often at its center, is still looking for love. And the wide-open floor for dance and for art has its beauty, too.
From song into space
Polonius: Will you walk out of the air, my lord?
The prince: Into my grave?
—Hamlet 2:2
Some twenty years ago, on entering his fifties, Ralph Lemon gave up a quite career in dance. He had left the Meredith Monk dance company in 1985 to found his own, but that, too, was no longer enough. Maybe he was sick of telling others what to do. While he had continued to dance for Alvin Ailey and others, he had always loved choreography as an art of collaboration—and any musical theater as mixed media, mixed influences, and sheer mania. Now he could fulfill that in what he liked to call No Dance, meaning performance. And now he takes that history to MoMA PS1 as "Ceremonies out of the Air." 
Some reaching so monumental decision would say they never look back. Lemon always looked back. He had made a point of injecting politics and history into his work, ever since co-founding the Mixed Blood Theater Company in 1976. He calls one work The Greatest (Black) History Ever Told, with his usual mix of ambition, irony, sincerity, and a gentle sense of humor directed first and foremost at himself. He looks back in a collage to a rural kitchen, where folks wear animal masks to tackle a half-eaten plate of pancakes and an untouched whole pineapple. He calls another piece, of half-length sculpture, his Consecration of Ancestor Figures.
If the collage is only a footnote to performance, performers elsewhere wear masks, too. It is his Rant (Redux), a raunchy and contemporary but still totemic song and dance. The title may refer to its recreation of a piece from 2000, but then what comes around goes around for Lemon, and he embellishes it further with Rant Residuum. They make a nice welcoming act to the exhibition, on four-channel video that gives a sense of performance in close-up, by Kevin Beasley and others, but also theater in the round, with the audience on camera, too. The singers are black and the song is black popular music, but the audience is both black and white—or maybe, as Lemon sometimes says, "blackified." Recent paintings are a collage of mixed culture, but also a look back at his own past work.
They are a look back, too, to his first love in art, painting, which continues with sheer abstraction, of circles embedded in the cells of a suitably sloppy grid. This is the world of his ancestors, but also of art, and that breakfast takes place across from an actual table of aluminum and black steel, set with unappetizing sculpture and draped below with electric lights. Lemon tackles the remains of Minimalism and performance, too, in FBN—where BN is Bruce Nauman and F is a four-letter word. The floor piece looks more like a gravestone than a celebration. At whom is the irony directed this time? You can judge for yourself.
Meanwhile, in still another video act, Lemon goes about his business of "harvesting" string. He may always be harvesting whatever he can toward whatever strikes his fancy. James Baldwin turns up in animation, barely blinking an eye. Yet the cast is rich, past and present, human and animal, and just one more thing as well. He finds his oldest collaborator on a final mission into space. Its videos take three rooms apart from the main display of his work, but he knows he has a long way to go.
This is his Walter Carter Suite, where Carter, born in 1907, was perhaps the last surviving sharecropper. The old man can collaborate on a spaceship regardless, although Lemon does the bulk of the work—and Carter, he seems to say, has better things to do than dwell on a painful history. If the human race is to endure, it, too, will have to transform that history into an improbable future. He is already listening, too, for extraterrestrials, with an antenna dish on top. In case you were worried, the ship also doubles as a doghouse. The completed ship on display in the gallery (or maybe another version of it) lacks both the dish and a dog, but it is only a work of art.
How silly is this? It becomes poignant all the same, as one of the two old men lies asleep or inert on rumpled sheets, with an old woman watching over him. (Lemon is now seventy-two.) He could be dead or dying, but in time he gets up, grabs the gun by his side, and leaves. He might have departed for this world or another. Unless, that is, one world is just the other redux.
Alvin Ailey ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through February 9, 2025, Ralph Lemon at MoMA PS1 through March 24.