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To wrap up from last time on black artists and ancient Egypt, the most potent ancient imagery cannot reduce past or present to a stereotype of greatness. Good art cannot appropriate tragedy on behalf of uplift. Rather, it returns quite literally from the grave to haunt the present.

Those black kids at the Met may have loved its Egyptian tomb as much as I did as a child, and so surely did Lauren Halsey. Just a summer ago, she took her version of the tomb upstairs for summer sculpture on the Met roof. It may have seemed awfully straightforward, like a recitation in school, but it evoked, her title explains, the east side of South Central LA. It was the story of her life, retold once more in a colorful collage on two square pillars here.

A full third of the show builds a scholarly history of greatness. If that sounds like a well-researched scam, then come kings and queens who cannot return from the dead. They can, though, learn from children, on a class trip or in O’Grady’s family album. Lonnie Holley transforms deities flanking a pharaoh’s tomb into very real, heavily swaddled children. If they seem one part comforted and one part repressed, so, they seem to say, are black families even today. When Betye Saar paints Window of Ancient Sirens, a triptych after a funerary mask of King Tut, she seems more disturbed than impressed.

Not that the accent is on subtlety. There is always the good cheer of Pop Art for Robert Colescott or the glorified street art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Kara Walker, though, subtitled her grandest public work A Subtlety, and she was not altogether ironic. For all its scale and glowing whiteness, it had black features far from an Egyptian sphinx. And she made it of sugar, like a product of the Domino Sugar plant displaced by gentrification right next door—or of slave labor in the Caribbean. The Met can include only a sketch, a quick one at that, but it will do.

Ancient monuments appear again in contemporary settings, but in miniature, as collectibles. How better for the oldest intercollegiate black fraternity to assert its identity than on boardroom shelves, in a painting by Derek Fordjour? How much better still to explore blackness than with actual shelves on a large field of black soap from Rashid Johnson? David Hammons creates his own pyramids of human hair, while Sam Gilliam creates his in Minimalist aluminum, wood, white, and blue. Maren Hassinger make her Love (Pyramid) both sculpture and performance, in pink balloons. While not much to do with Egypt, Terry Adkins still pays tribute to Carver’s oxidized blue.

Art for art’s sake or history’s makes only a fleeting appearance before the show’s final third, about music. It includes album covers, lots of them, and a space for Afrofuturism, which somehow includes Julie Mehretu, the abstract artist, along with Sun Ra in jazz. And who could deny the impact of African American musicians? Still, album covers can take things only so far, and references to Egypt seem no more than coincidental. Besides, the Met already installed a period room for Afrofuturism in 2021. To misquote Sun Ra, space here is no longer the place.

This is an enormous show for so tenuous a theme. It will be fine for those who seek only role models in the terror and turbulence of history. As a handy survey of contemporary black art, it cannot match a larger and smarter show centered on Alvin Ailey, the choreographer, at the Whitney. Not that it lacks for artists and anecdotes worth knowing, not by any means. Who could imagine that William T. Williams found inspiration for his gray diagonals in Nu Nile, a black hair-care product? There may be gray areas left in a field of black and white, but a museum owes art more than a royal mess.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Cleopatra’s throne does not look comfortable. No wonder she has taken her business elsewhere, into Egypt or into art.

Maybe it comes with the territory for so iconic a ruler and so fabled a beauty. The price of becoming an idol is a loss of humanity, in People or in history, all the more so when she knew that she was about to die. And Barbara Chase-Riboud does indeed give her a golden throne—or simulate one in small squares of polished bronze on wood. It looks magnificent, but also uncomfortably rigid and peeling, and no one would dare sit on it at the Met. She will, though, make more than one return along with a host of familiar images in a show of Black artists and Ancient Egypt, as “Flight into Egypt” through February 17. But are they truly an African American heritage for today?

Many have looked to Egypt before them—and thought it vital to black America’s humanity and dignity . Relate to Your Heritage, proclaimed Barbara Jones-Hogu, in psychedelic colors. The artist spoke out for a movement, AfriCOBRA, formed in the radicalism of the 1960s. Malcolm X traveled to Egypt three times, and a video shares a stop in Cairo. A photo by Eve Arnold accompanies black kids to the Met itself, where a boy in a while shirt and narrow tie could almost be Malcolm himself as a child. It seems only right for a show on the theme of awakening.

From the start, the Met argues, blacks contributed to scholarship on the region, from the Egyptology of the early twentieth century. George Washington Carver collected a sample of Egyptian blue (its ninth oxidation). Aaron Douglas applies the translucent colors that place him among the greatest in the Harlem Renaissance to a vision of ancient monuments. It could just as well represent a modern city under construction. The show takes its title from a loose painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, perhaps an oil sketch, in 1923. He had painted the interior of a mosque a quarter century before.

Two contributors, Steffani Jemison and Jamal Cyrus, set out a study room so that you can discover more. As usual with such rooms, it has an interest in telling you what to study. Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave and abolitionist, had no doubts what is at stake: whites had set out “to deny that the Egyptians were Negroes” in order “to deprive the Negro of the moral support of Ancient Greatness.” The curators, Akili Tommasino with McClain Groff, have to agree. Yet the art on display has many colors, and that could be an African American heritage, too.

Fred Wilson sets out busts of Nefertiti, after the famous one often seen in strict profile, in gradations from white to black. They occupy, the work’s title explains, a Gray Area, and this is its “brown version.” Lorraine O’Grady pairs still more images of the Egyptian queen with photographs of children she has known, as her Miscegenated Family Album. As for Cleopatra’s shade of brown, no one can say. She was the last in a dynasty that Alexander the Great had installed in the path of conquest, which is not to say what it became. Barbara Chase-Riboud does well by leaving her out of the picture.

Europe and America alike had a fascination with Egypt, like many a child at the Met today. J. P. Morgan traveled in person to confirm his scholarly credentials and to stock the Morgan Library. Maxime Du Camp, a close friend of Gustave Flaubert, took up photography to document cities and monuments. Meanwhile black artists like Emma Amos have made a pilgrimage to Africa in search of their cultural and family history, but not to Egypt. Others, like Toyin Ojih Odutola from Nigeria, are still between continents in their art. Exhibitions have returned more and more to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

Then, too, can a focus on African Americans shift those gray areas a little too far toward black and white? Could the Arab world and Islamic art have their own colors and history? Could that, too, be a part of black history in a way the Met cannot fully grasp. Tanner did, after all, paint a mosque. And yet the show at its best questions its own pat history. As a white male, I cannot speak for African Americans, but its artists are still asking what remains of ancient greatness—and I pick up next time with just that.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time on Alvin Ailey, an island for art right off the elevator points to his influence. The Whitney has commissioned portraits of dance by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Jennifer Packer, each a study in movement and color.

Also in 2024, Karon Davis renders a dancer in profile in plaster. Its tribute to freedom of motion takes on a spooky fixity in white. Here and elsewhere, the show exceeds Ailey’s lifetime. And it dares one to pick out what else does and what does not.

The Whitney sees the same themes as applying to Ailey and to twentieth-century art. Growing up fatherless in rural Texas, he would have seen what Thornton Dial called Shadows of the Field in 2008, and listened to spirituals, like those playing softly at the Whitney. He would have seen makeshift homes like the cabin in the cotton in a painting by Horace Pippin—or constructions in wood scraps like those of Beverly Buchanan well after Ailey’s death. The Great Migration took him to Harlem for its tombstone houses, its preachers, and its street life—just as it took others in works by Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, and William H. Johnson. All date to well before Ailey’s maturity.

He loved music, like the song of a choir boy in a photo by James van der Zee. He knew jazz musicians, like Elvin Jones in a photo by Roy DeCarava. He admired black women and black liberation. And he reveled in dance, much like a dancing elder in wood, fabric, and beads by John Outterbridge. The exhibition has room for an entire suite by Romare Bearden, Bayou Fever, full of life but far from Harlem. You will just have to take the Whitney’s word for it that abstraction from Sam Gilliam reflects the same rhythms.

If Modernism and contemporary art were not enough, the show throws in a landscape from 1851, a view of Cincinnati by Robert Duncanson. It brings Hudson River School light to a community for black Americans. But then history has a way of getting out of hand, even for Ailey. Who can claim it all, and who would want to try? Where to end and where to begin? Everything about the show rings false, but even its falsity has its rewards in discovery.

That very first island for art has its discoveries. It includes sculpture from Richmond Barthé as far back as 1913. Its video record includes Lorna Simpson in 2011, with pale orange dancers might have come from another dimension. Who knew a woman from Barkley Hendricks in unmoving profile as a dancer—or nylon stockings weighted with sand from Senga Nengudi as a dance? Now, perhaps but only perhaps, you will.

The surprises keep coming. A silhouette by Kara Walker hangs over the iconic Black Woman by Elizabeth Catlett. Manacles by Melvin Edwards speaks of black liberation. And then comes a River of steel chains and rope by Maren Hassinger. Lonnie Holley binds rocking chairs like electric chairs, with fire hoses. This will be one long emergency and one long struggle.

You may still reject the show’s premises, or you may see in it what set Ailey apart. The ABT was not half as confrontational as black experience might lead you to expect, for all the “edges” of Ailey. Jerome Robbins in West Side Story and George Balanchine in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, both white, choreographed violence. For Ailey, the African American struggle is a struggle for beauty. A black woman, so often at its center, is still looking for love. And the wide-open floor for dance and for art has its beauty, too.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

The largest gallery at the Whitney just got bigger. It has knocked down nearly every wall, leaving a dance theater that Alvin Ailey himself could never have experienced. For a more impressive stage, he would have had to turn to New York itself.

It is also an exhibition space—as capacious, the museum hopes, as African American art. It sees Ailey as a guide to the story of that art, including art that he may never have known. It must sound ridiculous. Who would attempt to tell that story in an exhibition or even two, no more than the story of Western or global art? It risks condescending to black artists by pretending that it can. And yet it succeeds, for theater becomes art and art becomes theater, as “Edges of Ailey,” through February 9, while an Ailey veteran, Ralph Lemon, at MoMA PS1 reaches for the stars.

This is epic theater. Works from more than eighty artists, many as large as a human performer, take the spotlight before disappearing into a greater darkness. Some occupy islands within “Edges of Ailey,” and you can circulate around and between them. Right off, that knocks out any hope for a chronological exhibition or even a story, but do not despair. The rest line the walls, as you would expect, and articulate the show’s themes. Smaller spaces at each end of the floor tell Ailey’s own interdisciplinary story.

Born in 1931, he studied with Stella Adler—not a choreographer, but a renowned acting teacher. He acknowledged the influence of Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Duke Ellington, and the show returns often to the Harlem Renaissance, painting and dance, black experience, and music, particularly jazz. He credited Geoffrey Holder as well, a friend who moved easily between the stage and art. Ailey founded the American Dance Theater in 1958, with thirty-two dancers and two directors. There, too, he was thinking of influence, collaboration, and community. He died in 1989 of AIDS.

The show includes publicity posters, playbills, and film clips culled from thousands of hours, and scheduled performance continues downstairs in the museum’s theater and on its roof as well. It has color photos of Ailey himself dancing, lingering on not just his movements, but his expressive face. Ailey made the scene in all sorts of ways. The ABT performed at the opening of Studio 54, the epitome of a club scene that would never admit you. And the show’s only window overlooks a Hudson River pier that served as a gay pick-up spot. The AIDS quilt bars the view.

Overhead on the show’s fantastic stage, choreography, too, lines the walls, in one long video collage spanning eighteen screens. It adds color, like the yellow robes of dancers. It provides a constant background of music, even if you look instead at the art. Mahalia Jackson introduces a work with music by Ellington, barely mentioning Ailey. This is his achievement all the same. It just happens to come down to two distinct exhibitions, for dance and for art.

The show is itself a collaboration, between the Whitney and the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation. Neither is willing to let Ailey’s work die with him. Nor are the curators, Adrienne Edwards with Joshua Lubin-Levy. They could have included only art that the choreographer admired or influenced, and perhaps they do. If so, he knew and influenced a lot. And that still leaves open just how present he is in the art—and I wrap this up next time with the art itself.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.