THIS PAST FALL, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art opened “Edges of Ailey,” a major exhibition dedicated to the pathbreaking dancer and choregrapher Alvin Ailey. To reflect on the epochal presentation, which was organized by Adrienne Edwards, Artforum spoke with Robert Garland, artistic director of The Dance Theatre of Harlem, whose 2025 New York season opens at the New York City Center next month.
“EDGES OF AILEY” was, for me, a family affair. Throughout the gallery, a bank of screens intermittently played footage of my cousin Deborah Manning performing Alvin Ailey’s solo Cry (1971) in Denmark while Mr. Ailey was still alive. Both Deborah and Judith Jamison, the dancer for whom Cry was originally choreographed, were from Philadelphia, where I am also from. The dance is a tour de force, with music by Alice Coltrane, Laura Nyro, and the Voices of East Harlem. Mr. Ailey was brilliant in that he pulled something out of my cousin that I had never seen before, even after having danced together at the Philadelphia Dance Company under the direction of Joan Myers Brown. The Whitney exhibition—full of wonderful cultural cross-referencing between Mr. Ailey’s own work and that of other artists—was done in the most breathtakingly beautiful and complete way, honoring many aspects, a lot of them frequently overlooked, about Mr. Ailey’s trajectory as a dancer, a choreographer, and a representative of Black culture.
Through his work, Mr. Ailey brought to the world a culture that had survived the Middle Passage, slavery, and Jim Crow. He himself was from Texas, so he was a part of a community that did not learn about the Emancipation Proclamation until years after the fact—hence the celebration of Juneteeth. While I can’t credit him with it directly, Mr. Ailey, and his Texas kin, created a sacred moment for us with Juneteeth, and the Ailey exhibition is an extension of that.
Like dance, visual art is about representation. The institutions of both Dance Theatre of Harlem, where I am artistic director, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater stood, and still stand, as leaders in the representation of Black bodies in dance, be it ballet or modern. Outside academia, people rarely see the connections between, say, Kara Walker, who is a visual artist I love, and Glenn Ligon, who is another visual artist I love, and the world of dance. They rarely understand that these environments—visual art and theater—are deeply connected; that dance artists nowadays get much of their inspiration from visual artists, such as the sculptor Karon Davis. I’m very close with Karon. At the Whitney, we find her beautiful white sculpture Dear Mama, 2024, a remarkable testament to the Black dancing female body. Ms. Davis’s father is Ben Vereen, who was a peer of both Alvin Ailey and Arthur Mitchell, founder of Dance Theatre of Harlem.
I met Alvin Ailey for the first time in the early 1980s through a dancer named Gary DeLoatch. Gary was in the Ailey company and a featured dancer there while I was a student at Juilliard; he was from Philadelphia as well. Gary would have me watch his apartment while he was on tour. I’d water his plants. Of course, I killed them right away, because I was eighteen years old—I didn’t know what I was doing. Eventually, he would have me cook meals and that sort of thing when he was in town. One time while I was preparing a meal, I opened the door, and Alvin Ailey was standing there. Another gentleman from the Ailey family, Mr. George Faison, was there as well. I was so nervous. I made a terrible mistake with the fried chicken, not frying it long enough, and George let me have it. He said: “Do you understand that Alvin Ailey’s in the other room?” He then helped me fix any mistakes I’d made.
Often, after your first success, people tend to box you in. One of the beautiful things about Mr. Ailey was that, yes, he did have a great success with the Negro spirituals represented in Revelations (1960), his best-known work, but he also had just as large a success with his works to the music of Duke Ellington, such as The River (1970), Night Creature (1974), Pas de Duke (1976), and more. It was his work with Ellington’s music that captured me; I love classical music, and many of the works that Mr. Ailey created to Ellington’s music were for his orchestral pieces, with full string sections.
The greatest accomplishment of the Whitney exhibition is that it captures the breadth of the African American experience and places it squarely in the trajectory of American history writ large. And for that I am thankful and grateful.
As told to Lloyd Wise.
Robert Garland is the artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem.
