{"id":19408,"date":"2025-10-03T14:58:50","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T14:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=19408"},"modified":"2025-10-03T14:58:50","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T14:58:50","slug":"constellatory-blackness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=19408","title":{"rendered":"Constellatory Blackness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This review originally appeared in Art Journal<\/em>, 84, no. 2 (Summer 2025)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Edges of Ailey<\/em><\/strong>, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 25, 2024\u2013February 9, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edges of Ailey<\/em>, ed. Adrienne Edwards,<\/strong> Exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, 2024. 388 pp.; 259 color ills., 167 b\/w; $65<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Choreographer and artist Alvin Ailey (1931\u20131989) functions as a conduit for glimpsing histories of Blackness in the Whitney Museum of American Art\u2019s exhibition and eponymous catalog, Edges of Ailey.<\/em> A combinatory selection of Ailey\u2019s archival ephemera and visual materials\u2014Ailey\u2019s journals, dance company promotional materials, photographs, videos, and artworks\u2014Edges of Ailey<\/em> marks the first comprehensive exhibition to frame histories of Black visualization and material culture through the life and legacy of this mainstream choreographer. Whitney curator Adrienne Edwards takes a multilayered approach that attends to Ailey\u2019s life as \u201ckaleidoscopic\u201d and \u201cpolyvocal,\u201d that is, both representative of the individual and indicative of a wider, constellatory body of Blackness. As she explains in her introductory catalog essay, \u201cSuch Sweet Thunder,\u201d \u201cWhat Mr. Ailey\u2019s work suggests is that a void of love towards Blackness does not confine or undermine what Blackness is and how it might be presented; and that although racist sentiments are prevalent in the world \u2026 they do not overwhelm how we make our worlds and revel in them\u201d (19). Edwards asks her audience to approach Ailey, his archives, and his works as vectors within this constellation of Blackness, and to recognize his artistic singularity as a constant unraveling of Black(ened) histories and futures.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it unfolds throughout the third and fifth-floor galleries of the museum, Edges of Ailey<\/em> reproduces these constellations of being with visual and sonic resonance. A suite of performances occupies the museum\u2019s third-floor theater, featuring a rotation of works from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT), its offshoots Ailey II and the Ailey School, as well as commissioned dances from Ronald K. Brown; Trajal Harrell; Bill T. Jones; Ralph Lemon and Kevin Beasley; Sarah Michelson; Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born; Will Rawls; Matthew Rushing; Yusha-Marie Sorzano; and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. In the fifth-floor galleries, songs such as the nineteenth-century African American spiritual, \u201cI\u2019ve Been \u2018Buked and I\u2019ve Been Scorned\u201d and Leon Russell\u2019s \u201cA Song for You\u201d punctuate audio from interviews, broadcasts, and spoken love letters\u2014comprising an Ailey-inspired \u2018mixtape\u2019 that spills out into the museum\u2019s hallways. The soundscape correlates with a projection of archival footage that runs along the upper perimeter of the gallery walls. Scenes from Ailey\u2019s life create a warm glow throughout the room, as the eighteen-channel video installation traverses several decades of recordings from Ailey\u2019s eponymous dance company. Below this perimeter, the room optically vibrates with a sensuous crimson hue, a nod to the velvet spaces of the proscenium theater, but even deeper, a call to Ailey\u2019s notion of \u201cblood memories\u201d\u2014as suggested by a wall label referring to \u201c[Ailey\u2019s] recollections of the blues, spirituals, gospel, work songs, all those things going on in Texas in the 1930s during the Depression.\u201d Ailey\u2019s blood memories thus become the substructures of Edwards\u2019s exhibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scattered about the space, angular platforms are drenched in that familiar blood-red hue. They seem to rise out of the floor to produce half-walls, pedestals, and semi-pyramidal forms that subtend the medley of objects. The irregular display creates an archipelagic effect that fragments the space and collection into several thematic groupings, which Edwards identifies as\u2014but does not limit to\u2014Southern Imaginary, Black Spirituality, Black Migration, Black Liberation, Black Women, Ailey\u2019s Collaborators, Black Music, Ailey\u2019s Influences, and After Ailey (331). Looking at Benny Andrews\u2019s painting, The Way to the Promised Land (Revival Scene)<\/em>, of 1994, one\u2019s eye catches objects within the periphery, generating a connection between surrounding works such as Theaster Gates\u2019s Minority Majority<\/em> (2012), Sam Doyle\u2019s Frank Capers<\/em> (1970), and Charles White\u2019s Preacher<\/em> (1952). The visual coalescing intimately associates Black spirituality and transcendence with the surreptitious histories of Black survival, encompassing resistance, pleasure, and queerness. Edwards\u2019s fractal approach has multiple points of origin: she first recognizes the acute reference to Ailey\u2019s Archipelago,<\/em> of 1970, which blended the disciplinary languages of classical ballet and modern dance to explore a cultural relationality of locomotion. However, the specificity of this reference recalls a wider theoretical positioning of the archipelago as a mode of ambiguous being correspondent with ontological Blackness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a parallel vein, the exhibition catalog approaches Ailey through the diffracted voices of those closest to him\u2014even if their proximity is one of posthumous familiarity. An anthology of essays, interviews, and letters, the catalog comprises a polyvocal expression of love and nostalgic reminiscing that literalizes an era \u201cafter Ailey.\u201d Dancer and scholar Thomas DeFrantz, whose extensive publications include a book on Ailey\u2019s Revelations<\/em>, presents an emphatic letter to the choreographer. DeFrantz\u2019s piece is an accumulation of reverence, simultaneously effusing over, relating to, inquiring of, and thanking Ailey for his work as a gay Black man in the public eye. Similar sentiments ring throughout the catalog, as former Ailey dancers Masazumi Chaya, Judith Jamison, Sylvia Waters and Aimee Meredith Cox; luminaries Adrienne Edwards, Malik Gaines, Horace D. Ballard, Uri McMillan, Ariel Osterweis, and numerous others come together in homage to Ailey. However, their voices culminate in a passage offered by DeFrantz, whose letter articulates this larger, collective indebtedness:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of us working in dance or Black visual cultures or maybe even music moves without relationship to what you created, as strange as that surely sounds. We all belong to you somehow; we are among your edges and your legacies as people who wonder about dance. We think of you and the most famous images of your form from the 1960s onward: beautiful of body and unflappable integrity of commitment to give dance back to the people. We people<\/em> (101).One must negotiate with the exhibition and the catalog\u2019s aberrant construction, both installation and publication forging individualistic paths of knowing Ailey. Archipelagic thinking, an ontological framework commonly attributed to Martinican poet and philosopher \u00c9douard Glissant, emphasizes the refractory nature of Blackness as the means for perspicacious being. Black diversities, whether rendered through displacement or migration, are historically incompatible with the colonialist machinations of a continental identity. According to Glissant, archipelagic thinking \u201caccepts the practice of the detour, which is not the same as fleeing or giving up. It recognizes the range of the imaginations of the [diasporic] Trace \u2026 it means being in harmony with the world as it is diffracted in archipelagos, precisely, these sorts of diversities in spatial expanses which nevertheless rally coastlines and marry horizons.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> Intentional or not, Edwards\u2019s invocation of the archipelagic as geographic and geologic substructure parallels Ailey\u2019s overarching concept of blood memory as an orientation of Blackness. Artwork and archive intermingle through the cross-relationality of blood memory, pulling from the choreographer\u2019s diverse range of interests, curiosities, and obsessions to promote a glimpse of Ailey beyond the legacy already inherited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So much of Edwards\u2019s curatorial process is a disruptive act of glimpsing, as Edges of Ailey<\/em>\u2014through its very invocation of disparate visual, textual and corporeal materials\u2014reconsolidates a history of Ailey\u2019s dual being, one split between the public and the private. Edwards recognizes the intentional bifurcation of Ailey\u2019s archive as an integral, yet contradictory, component in his [re]narrativization. Notebooks, videos, photographs, letters and related communication, recordings, posters, books, and typescripts constitute two halves of Ailey\u2019s material shadow. On the one hand, ephemera related to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) has become part of a larger archival system. Once transferred to the Library of Congress in 2006, this half of Ailey would come to represent a public-facing legacy open to conscription for the sociologic amelioration of Black life. On the other hand, one finds Ailey\u2019s personal effects through an internal monologue of written and visual materials that reveal moments of Black queer existence. This latter collection is part of the Allan Gray Family Personal Papers of Alvin Ailey, held at the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City. As Edwards explains, her reunification of these two halves is intended as a political act that underscores Ailey\u2019s actuality as contradictorily whole, despite an archival bifurcation dictated by anti-Blackness (12). Edges of Ailey<\/em> thus rekindles a history of queer being through the serendipitous assemblages of Black art, dance, and text, revealing what Edwards refers to as \u201ca politics of sparkle,\u201d one designating how pleasure and embrace of Blackness persists in the very essence of Black being (118).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his catalog essay, \u201cElegant Mutinies,\u201d curator Horace Ballard engages with Ailey\u2019s archival and embodied partitioning as evoking a \u201cBlack Church tradition,\u201d the term designating a metaphor of Blackness and redress rooted in histories of Christian doxa and concomitant white domination (59). As a colonial project, religion was gifted, sometimes forcefully, to subjugated communities in an attempt to justify the violence and domination of colonialism, chattel slavery, and segregation (60). With time, even these recognized sentiments of being became cause for white concern; the Black church was a metaphorical transfiguration of Blackness, built from biblical narratives of violence, martyrdom, and survival that culminate in the possibility of retribution and liberation. Simultaneously, Ballard proposes the Black church tradition as metonymic of Blackness, encompassing spheres of Black communion and kinship; expressions of Black soul performance; a \u201clarger, gothic architectonic relationality\u201d known as the South; and the customs of Black respectability politics (60\u201361). Seemingly disparate in form, the Black church represents a mode of being that historically separated the public from the private as a means for redress and retribution couched in clandestine desires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, the Black church tradition is founded on the separation of one\u2019s life, a partitioning of expectation and desire that began with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Ballard reveals a tension of being that continues to conscript the Black body in a larger operation of freedom, while simultaneously denying the pleasures that define true liberation. In many ways, Ballard suggests that Ailey\u2019s difficulty in choosing between closeted-ness and out-ness is prescriptive of the contradictory m\u00e9lange of public and private manifested through histories of the Black church tradition. And yet, this paradox speaks to the nuanced realities of the Black church as an origin of soul<\/em>\u2014a \u201cco-constitutive alliance between the sacred and the secular in individual and collective Black lives\u201d\u2014which emanates from the frictional realities synonymous with Blackness (61\u201363). Reminiscent of scholar Saidiya Hartman\u2019s thought on Blackness and pleasure, soul becomes a mode of redress that is a \u201cstealing away\u201d of pleasure through performances of Blackness.3<\/a><\/sup> As Hartman explains, \u201cStealing away involved unlicensed movement, collective assembly, and an abrogation of the terms of subjection in acts as simple as \u2026 making nocturnal visits to loved ones.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup> Whether described as being in and of the Black church, blood memories, or even \u201cstealing away,\u201d Ailey\u2019s choreographies issued out of a contentious history of Blackness and being that deemed instances of pleasure and truth to always already be evocative of dissent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ailey\u2019s choreographic and written legacies reveal an imbrication of the public and private to which Ballard and Hartman refer. Throughout the exhibition, visitors are able to read through various Ailey journal entries that divulge points of inspiration directly connected to his life as both queer and Black. One such entry outlined types of love and relationality that contributed to Ailey\u2019s series, Love Songs<\/em> (1972), which enumerates types of sexual and platonic love beginning with a duet representing the love of man for woman. As the entry continues, one finds multiple pairings: the love of man for man; of woman for woman; of men for women \u201cgroup dance\u2014orgy slow moving\u201d; of parental love for children, both \u201cprotective\u201d and \u201cinstructive\u201d; of man for man \u201chelpful\u2013brotherly\u201d; of a \u201cvery deep love of man for woman,\u201d which is described as a solo; and finally of \u201clove for self\u201d (305). As Edwards points out in a dialogue with performance scholar Claire Bishop, these lists communicate an underlying essence of queer relationality that, while unspoken, permeates the very archive Ailey rendered as separate. Edwards\u2019s decision to incorporate Ailey\u2019s inner monologue via notebook and journal entry creates space for Black queer being as profuse and foundational to the structures of being in and of the world today. Edwards writes, \u201cWe need to speak of Mr. Ailey in the genealogy of Black gay people before and alongside him, from figures in the Harlem Renaissance \u2026 to the civil rights era \u2026\u201d (21). One cannot untether Ailey\u2019s queerness from his Blackness, just as one cannot unravel the bind of Blackness and modern humanist projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such is the tipping point of this exhibition. Edges of Ailey<\/em> highlights the very imbrication of Blackness and modernity through its various references to dance and visual art. Throughout both exhibition and catalog, Edwards is forthright in her pairing of archive and artwork, understanding that although Ailey may not, and sometimes cannot, have encountered some of the included works, they characterize the ongoing evolutions of American modernist theory and praxis. One of the exhibition\u2019s central plinth-archipelagos supports David Hammons\u2019s Untitled<\/em> (1992), a bed of gray stones that give birth to long, spiderlike tendrils of human hair. An accretion of the organic and inorganic worlds, the piece gathers found materials such as wire, metallic mylar, string, plastic beads, pantyhose, and a sledgehammer, each item covered with kinked tendrils of discarded hair from Harlem barbershops. Hammons transforms the ephemera of life into something unrecognizable, visually and physically obfuscating objects beneath traces of the Black body. Adjacent to Hammons\u2019s work is Sam Gilliam\u2019s Untitled (Black)<\/em> of 1978, one of several monochromes that similarly obscure vibrancies of color through the compression and compounding of black acrylic. In both works, a tactile, material density pulls the viewer into a spatial and emotional dialogue. While the viewer\u2019s proximity to the surfaces of sculpture and painting suggest surrender, both artworks remain indeterminate, obscuring the world beneath a Black(ened) exterior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Responding to the concomitant pressures of abstraction and purity, Hammons and Gilliam work within a visceral and resistive practice of visualization that ruptures the paradigms of capital-M Modernism. As both sociopolitical existence and artistic practice, Modernism is historically built on the extraction of Black culture and labor, beginning with the Middle Passage and persisting through the anti-Black violence of our own era. And one would be remiss to ignore the epitome of white modernism, Kazimir Malevich\u2019s painting, Black Square<\/em> (1915), as visually built atop a racist joke of 1898.5<\/a><\/sup> Modernism is historically built upon the very substance of Black(ened) flesh, a mutable material with endless potentiality. The same holds true for modern dance, which continuously looked to Black, Indigenous, and non-white cultural forms as fodder for experimentation. As scholar Malik Gaines explains in his catalog essay, \u201cModernity and its aesthetic, modernism, are thorny problems in the afterlife of the colony. That problematization is the intrinsic material of Ailey\u2019s work\u201d (42). An Ailey dance like Revelations<\/em> (1960) opened the world to a vernacular of Black modernist dance that endured betwixt the concert stage and the reality of being, the representation and the real, the public and the private. To make work in this world\u2014a world still reeling in the wake of slavery\u2014is to participate in a dialogue of modernist conditions, recentering the experiences of Blackness as multiply beautiful and violent. While Ailey was never a political figure, his work bespeaks a Black expressivity that, though tinged by histories of domination, re-present the ever-changing constellations of Blackness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

L. Annalise Palmer<\/strong> is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at Penn State University, University Park.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n
<\/div>
  1. I invoke Iman Jackson\u2019s use of \u201cblack(ened)\u201d in recognition of race that is not possessed, but is possessive; see Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World<\/em> (NYU Press, 2020). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  2. \u00c9douard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World<\/em>, trans. Celia Britton, Glissant Translation Project (Liverpool University Press, 2020), 18. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  3. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America<\/em>, rev. and updated ed. (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), 110\u201313. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  4. Hartman, 113. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  5. Steven Nelson and Huey Copeland, eds., Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World,<\/em> (Yale University Press, 2023), 5\u20138. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Revisiting the legacy of Alvin Ailey<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":19410,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1650,1651,8,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-exhibition-reviews","category-from-art-journal","category-uncategorized",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}