During a recent visit to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, I noticed a woman in the gift shop open the catalog for Edges of Ailey—an exhibition devoted to the dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey—and point proudly to a portrait of herself among the dancers. That made sense. Dance is ephemeral, experiential, but photographs are enduring. Without photography, how would dance be memorialized? Some might argue that video offers a closer impression of a performance, but permissions and quality can make reviewing archival events difficult. Image-making is memento mori embodied, which feels appropriate for an artist with a death-defying legacy. The curator Adrienne Edwards describes the exhibition as the culmination of years of research, an “interdisciplinary extravaganza,” within which photography plays a formative role. But what is the connection between Ailey’s distinct art and the ephemeral image?

For Edges of Ailey, the museum’s fifth floor was transformed into a den of crimson and shadows: the walls were Lynchian red. Opaque, rouge curtains covered the windows and tinted the New Jersey skyline and Hudson River the color of blood. Set near the ceiling, a long video montage of performance clips ran the length of the gallery, while existing and newly commissioned artworks by Black artists both living and dead occupied the center of the floor. Upon entry, visitors were almost violently confronted with the thesis: “THIS IS DANCE. THIS IS ART. THIS IS ALVIN AILEY.” Yet, as the exhibition title suggests, we only get an outline.

Photography was positioned most prominently in the exhibition’s first section, which focuses on music and Ailey’s notion that dance is a conduit for sound, rather than response. This is illustrated effectively, if slightly predictably, by the selection of images. Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava bear the weight of such visualizations, by turns moody and romantic in their depictions of John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, and a couple lost in emotion in a string duet. Lyle Ashton Harris’s Billie #21 (2002), a self-portrait of the artist in costume as Billie Holiday, is the most recent work, but it makes an obvious connection, amplified by the other selected photographs. Works by James Van Der Zee, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and even Carrie Mae Weems, for example, seem like a greatest hits compilation dispatched to highlight Ailey’s connection to civil rights and labor movements, spirituality, and the history of enslavement in the United States.

Other sections of the show touch on Ailey’s collaborators and influences, but the aforementioned artists aren’t included. The works of the photographers (and most of the artists in the exhibition) connect to the themes in Ailey’s work, but not to Ailey himself. This does not detract from the beauty of the photographs, nor the sense that Ailey would commune deeply with them, but too frequently they are wielded as illustrations of concepts and fail to illustrate a specific relationship to Ailey as a person, as an artist, rather than the notion of his legacy.

Edges of Ailey exists in a climate of institutions playing catch-up—recognizing the contributions Black artists have made to their respective fields—to the point where I feel if you’ve seen one Van Der Zee you’ve seen them all, especially for visitors to any major New York survey in the last few years, such as The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at The Met, which seemed to have a Van Der Zee every two paces, or Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now at the Guggenheim, which positioned Fani-Kayode’s work in conversation with Robert Mapplethorpe’s.

On the literal edges of the exhibition were portraits of Ailey by Carl Van Vechten. These offer more direct evidence of Ailey’s relationship to photography, and to visual art in general. Van Vechten was a white writer known for inserting himself into the Harlem Renaissance via his controversial novel N***** Heaven (1926). He later pivoted to photography, and became famous for his portraits of prominent artists and intellectuals. The intimate images here hold many of the visual cues referenced in Ailey’s work, including early twentieth-century studio work (for instance, Van Der Zee’s The Actor) and iconography from African spiritual practices, rendered in lush, sensuous color akin that of Fani-Kayode.

Throughout the show, glimpses of Ailey appear in the form of ephemera, such as show documentation, or newly commissioned works by artists such as Jennifer Packer, but the portraits offer the most direct view. His expressions are coy, his gestures controlled. The backgrounds are rich in hue and pattern, with shadowy vignetting that holds much visual weight. There is something about this set of images that implies Ailey was aware of the power of being seen, especially by the white gaze. Perhaps he could intuit that, like his pieces, he could not be seen nor preserved in totality. But, like the woman in the lobby, he knew there was still something worth sharing, worth being proud of, something worth dancing for.

Edges of Ailey was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from September 25, 2024 through February 9, 2025.