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On view
August 21, 2025 to January 4, 2026
Alex Katz: Theater and Dance is the first comprehensive exploration of Katz’s playful and inventive collaborations with choreographers, dancers, and members of avant-garde theater ensembles over six decades. The exhibition showcases rare archival materials, major sets and paintings, and previously unexhibited sketches from more than two dozen productions. In addition to presenting a range of works by innovators across the performing arts and poetry, it spotlights fifteen productions that Katz produced with Paul Taylor, exploring the creative partnership that produced some of the most significant postmodern dance of the twentieth century. The exhibition, organized by the Colby College Museum of Art, reveals how Katz’s singular creative sensibility lies in his spirited, iterative approach to theater and dance design and in fascinating crossovers between the artist’s studio and the stage.
Artworks from the show are drawn from the comprehensive Alex Katz holdings at the Colby College Museum of Art, home to a collection of nearly 900 works by the artist, and complemented by unpublished, never before exhibited sketches from the artistʼs collection, major sets and paintings, and rare archival materials from Paul Taylor Dance Company, among other key loans attesting to the intertwined histories of painting and production design in Katzʼs career. This broad range of material, together with the insights of many Katz collaborators past and present, provides an innovative kind of retrospective: that of an artistic sensibility.
Alex Katz: Theater and Dance offers an unparalleled opportunity to experience Katzʼs designs and creative process. It demonstrates how the central qualities of Katzʼs art—his radical sense of scale and cropping, his unrivaled study of light and color, his eccentric imagination and sense of humor—have taken shape and been reflected across two dozen or more dance and theater productions in New York and beyond.
The exhibition is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue produced by Rizzoli on the occasion of the presentation of Alex Katz: Theater and Dance at the Colby College Museum of Art. The publication not only yields original scholarship on Katz, but enriches histories of mid-twentieth century theater and dance in its deep research and comparative focus. Contributors include Charles Reinhart, a champion of modern dance, who writes about the textures of the Paul Taylor-Alex Katz creative partnership; David Salle, an acclaimed painter, writer, and set designer, who discusses the image and communication-focused design strategies that Katz adopted in distinction to his dance and theater design contemporaries; and Diana Tuite, a curator of modern and contemporary art who provides original research and indispensable context for Katzʼs varied engagements with theatrical productions. Entries for each production are supplemented by first-hand accounts of performances by Jennifer Tipton, an award-winning lighting designer and a stalwart of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, as well as by Alex Katz himself. The American Federation of Arts will produce an exhibition brochure featuring an essay by Levi Prombaum and the exhibition checklist, alongside select illustrations. This brochure will be free to visitors at each venue.
Levi Prombaum is the former Katz Consulting Curator at the Colby College Museum of Art, where he presented Alex Katz: Theater and Dance alongside All in One: Selections from the Alex Katz Foundation Collection. He has recently served as an American Council of Learned Societies Leading Edge Fellow at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and as a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow. Prombaum was the assistant editor and lead contributor for the catalogue accompanying the Guggenheim Museumʼs retrospective, Alex Katz: Gathering.
Alex Katz: Theater and Dance is organized by the American Federation of Arts and Colby College Museum of Art. This exhibition is curated by Levi Prombaum, former Katz Consulting Curator, Colby College Museum of Art. The 2022 presentation of Alex Katz: Theater and Dance was organized by the Colby Museum with curatorial guidance from Robert Storr.
The American Federation of Arts is the leader in traveling exhibitions internationally. A nonprofit organization founded in 1909, the AFA is dedicated to enriching the public’s experience and understanding of the visual arts through organizing and touring art exhibitions for presentation in museums around the world, publishing exhibition catalogues featuring important scholarly research, and developing educational programs.
Top: Alex Katz, "Last Look," 1986. Collection of the artist. Photo by Paul Takeuchi. © 2024 Alex Katz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Courtesy American Federation of Arts.