Alvin Ailey

No one is credited with doing more to popularize modern dance and to revolutionize African-American participation in concert dance performance than Alvin Ailey. Founder of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1977; Kennedy Center Honors in 1988; and a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. Ailey danced in clubs in San Francisco’s Western Addition for several years in the early 1950’s. He met jazz dancer Zack Thompson, to whom this exhibit is dedicated, while dancing and performing in SF clubs together. Photo Credit Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection