A sprawling homage to American choreographer and dancer Alvin Ailey opened at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art this past September, the first large-scale museum exhibition to honour the figure since his death in 1989. Described by curator Adrienne Edwards as an “extravaganza”, Edges of Ailey chronicles Ailey’s life, influences and legacy across an imaginative range of forms, transforming the fifth-floor Whitney galleries into a space invoking an old-age theatre; the walls have been painted a deep red, luxurious curtains veil windows overlooking Manhattan and the room has been reconfigured with dim lighting that makes a giant band of screens the exhibition’s dramatic centre of gravity. Flashing brightly between the gallery’s exposed ceiling and red walls below, an 18-channel video installation by filmmakers Josh Begley and Kya Lou plays recordings from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) repertory on loop. A visitor might catch multiple performances of one of Ailey’s works, with two or more iterations shown side-by-side on screen. The sight of different dancers twirling in perfect sync across time is mesmerising and speaks to the deep reverberations of Ailey’s choreographic precision.

While the exhibition in some ways presents itself as a screening, it also borrows elements one might find in a history museum or library display. Paper ephemera such as notebook scraps and letters from Ailey’s lifetime are showcased in vitrines throughout. One frayed note features the artist’s handwritten thoughts “on the taste of the American Public”, and reads “religious / in search of romance / spectacle / sex / form / good & listenable music / nostalgia / hope / happiness / entertainment”. One wing of the gallery space focuses on Ailey’s early-career influences: where small televisions offer clips of performances from luminaries of modern dance, including Katherine Dunham and Catherine Lavallade, who were both collaborators and mentors. The opposite wing is devoted to the legacy of AAADT and includes posters advertising decades of performances, as well as digital infographics created by researchers Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit, which visualise data on the repertory’s members, programming and international touring over its years.

Edges of Ailey also includes an aggregation of striking visual art from over 80 artists at its centre: these include pioneers across visual movements and generations, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Faith Ringgold and Kevin Beasley. The work displayed includes direct meditations on dance after Ailey, but it also speaks to Ailey’s artistic concerns, including Black spirituality, migration, liberation, southern imaginaries and histories of Black music. Among these contributions are several pieces by choreographer and visual artist Ralph Lemon (b.1952): a 1999 oil stick drawing titled Alvin Ailey Dancing Revelations #3 is included in the exhibition’s ‘Blackness in Dance’ section, with works that meditate on Ailey’s legacy of charting a path into the form for Black dancers and choreographers. Another is a series of small-scale drawings inspired by Lemon’s years travelling through the Mississippi Delta, “the birthplace of the Blues” from which Ailey also drew inspiration. Serendipitously, a whole store of Lemon’s reckoning with the histories and music traditions of the Mississippi Delta is on view in his survey at the Museum of Modern Art PS1 in Long Island City, Queens: Ceremonies out of the Air.

While more modest in size, Lemon’s exhibition at MoMA PS1 also rises to the task of honouring the oeuvre of an influential choreographer with fidelity and gravitas: this time platforming a living artist’s ongoing work. Agnes Gund Director Connie Butler, MoMA Department of Media and Performance curator Thomas Lax and MoMA PS1 assistant curator Kari Rittenbach have incorporated innovative multi-channel video installations throughout MoMA PS1’s third-floor gallery spaces. This includes four massive screens that surround a sitting area to stage Rant redux (2020-24), which captures the live performance of Lemon’s Rant (2019-ongoing). Unlike some performances one might witness in the montage at Edges of Ailey, Rant redux syncs multiple angles of one performance. These include skewed close-ups where the dancers’ sweat is visible as they engage in spasmodic movements to a score by artist Kevin Beasley, along with side shrieks, howls and Lemon’s chanting of words by Angela Davis and other liberationist thinkers. While the sensory impact of the video and sound featured in Edges of Ailey is one of reverence and celebration, Rant redux pulls a visitor straight into the effusion of grief and anger central to Lemon’s project.

Featuring sculptures made of a performance of Residuum, drawings, an ongoing collage series and video work produced by Lemon, Ceremonies out of the Air modulates several different tones across media. There is a cacophonous, energetic force behind Lemon’s experiments; one gallery is devoted to the ‘Walter Carter Suite’ referenced in the wall label accompanying Lemon’s contribution at the Whitney, a section which culls videos, installations and drawings inspired by Lemon’s research in the Mississippi Delta. In 2002, Lemon met Walter Carter, a former sharecropper who became his close friend and collaborator until Carter’s death in 2010. With each “chapter” projected successively into a different wall, the five-part video installation at the centre of the gallery follows Lemon and Carter’s collaborations through what Lemon refers to as “para-performances”. Among these scenes are playful dances in which Carter’s family members wear animal masks and the construction of a “spaceship” – inspired by Carter’s desire to visit the moon. (Carter’s son Warren and a neighbour crafted it from junk material in the wake of Carter’s death.)

The spaceship, suspended from the gallery’s ceiling while projecting extraterrestrial landscapes onto the floor, jogged my memory of a poem featured in Edges of Ailey by esteemed American writer and activist Nikki Giovanni, who passed away on December 9, 2024 at 81. Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We’re Going to Mars) repeats twice, “The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.” The poem is included in a section of the Whitney exhibition that speaks to the theme of black migration in Ailey’s oeuvre, including a number of Afrofuturistic pieces in which artists have imagined charting radical new paths beyond conditions of enslavement. Lemon’s ‘Walter Carter Suite’ recalls at once Ailey’s Black Southern imaginaries, the spirit of collaboration that defined his work and the idea of perpetuating alternative futures. Ailey and Lemon are forerunners of movement arts within their respective eras and inevitably, the dominating aesthetics of their museum surveys diverge. Importantly, Edges of Ailey celebrates the continued influence of an artist who passed away in 1989, while Ceremonies out of the Air marks a significant moment in a living artist’s career and platforms several debuts of his ongoing collaborative performances. Yet witnessing both exhibitions, one can see a lineage emerge clearly—both Ailey and Lemon have challenged notions of time by drawing from the rich resources of history and extending their influences into their experimental thrust toward the future. In Edges of Ailey and Ceremonies out of the Air, the legacy of their respective artists comes alive in present-day innovations that break the boundaries of a traditional institutional art exhibition. Both exhibitions feature a synchronous program of live performances as a powerful means to activate each choreographer’s work in real-time. The Ceremonies Out of the Air performance programme includes several New York City and world premieres of Lemon’s newest works, including Rant #6 in spring 2025. Meanwhile, Edges of Ailey presents ongoing intimate live performances by AAADT in Whitney’s third-floor theatre, as well as a number of workshops, education programmes and dance commissions by leading choreographers and their collaborators.

‘Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon’ is on view at MoMA PS1 until March 25, 2025, while  ‘Edges of Ailey’ runs at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York until February 9, 2025.