At the Whitney, a Stirring Ailey Tribute Moves Dance to the Edge

With the spirited, sense-surround show called “Edges of Ailey” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York art season gets off to an exuberant, enveloping, though puzzling start.

The show is a major institutional tribute to the American choreographer and performer Alvin Ailey (1931-1989). It’s also a relatively rare example of a traditionally object-intensive art museum giving full-scale treatment to the ephemeral medium of dance.

But if you anticipated, as I did, that this would mean a display of documentary photographs, some archival materials (costumes, stage designs), and — best — extensive examples of dance on film, you’ve got a surprise in store.

Center top, Jennifer Packer’s “Not Yet Titled,” 2024; bottom, from left, John Outterbridge’s “The Elder, Ethnic Heritage series,” 1971–72; Eldren Bailey’s concrete “Dancers,” 1960s; Richmond Barthé’s “African Dancer,” 1933, from “Edges of Ailey” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Modern dance seemed to encapsulate all of my ideas,” Ailey said in a 1984 interview. “There was movement, there was color, there was painting, there was sculpture, and there was the putting it all together.”

The show takes Ailey at his word. It’s the “all” he speaks of that’s here. On the Whitney’s fifth floor you enter a wide-open gallery dominated by an 18-channel video montage of flickering bodies and talking heads. But it serves as a kind of audiovisual backdrop to many dozens of objects — paintings, sculptures, collages, prints — rich in imaginative variety, diverse in content, and many with no immediate connection to Ailey himself. Which is where puzzlement sets in: how “Ailey” is the show? And, for that matter, how much about dance?