Alvin Ailey, the Man and the Mind Behind the Unapologetic Sparkle

In “Edges of Ailey,” a new exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the choreographer takes center stage. It’s another revelation.

The name Ailey is synonymous with dance. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is more than a company: It’s a brand, an integral piece of the cultural fabric of this country. It’s huge.

But somehow the man who created the Ailey empire has become lost inside it, obscured as if by an eclipse. Alvin Ailey was a choreographer who seamlessly melded dance forms, a dancer of extraordinary strength and beauty, and a man — a queer man — with an expansive, restless mind.

He formed his company in 1958 and died of AIDS in 1989. He was only 58. What Ailey accomplished in his short life was remarkable: Building an internationally known dance company, an esteemed school and a body of work that explored the Black experience and dance history in a multitude of ways, while also mining the culture that surrounded him. He was very much engaged in the worlds of visual art, literature, poetry, music and gay life. Everything was his clay. His company was integrated — on purpose — but he inspired Black dancers particularly, showing them that there was a place for them.

Certainly Ailey is a father of Black dance — especially of Black modern dance. Did he want to be? The Ailey organization is perhaps the only institution that has come close to or surpassed the success of modern dance’s longtime artistic rival: ballet. But for Ailey, it came at a price. The weight of it all must have been crushing. “Use tea for drug needs,” he advised himself in one of his personal notebooks.

“Edges of Ailey,” opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Sept. 25, is a one-of-a-kind exhibition that looks at Ailey in all his dimensions, personal and artistic, as well as the culture that he shaped. One of the most ambitious shows the museum has ever presented — six years in the making and bigger than any Whitney biennial — it tracks the development of an American art form through Ailey’s singular vision. Here is a chance to better understand the man behind that vision, to watch his dances with new eyes.