"Alex Katz: Theater and Dance" is a travelling exhibition on display at the Baker Museum of Art through February 2.
Katz was a painter who loved to dance. After being introduced to Paul Taylor, a trained painter turned dancer, Katz spent decades deeply immersed in the realms of theater and dance. His body of work explores the creative crosscurrents of these complementary fields in much the same way that Robert Rauschenberg worked with Merce Cunningham and John Cage.
“I love finding stories like that to explore, especially here at Artis Naples, where our programming includes both the very best of visual arts and performing arts,” said Baker Museum Gallery Director Courtney McNeil. “And what really thrilled me about this exhibition was that we had the opportunity to present this story about Alex Katz in the galleries and, at the same time this season in January, we’re bringing Paul Taylor Dance Company to Artis—Naples to perform in Hayes Hall.”
Beyond the Paul Taylor performance, the exhibit includes a number of multi-media components.
“We were excited at the opportunity to contextualize [Katz’s works] with the presentation of videos and projections of dancers performing in the costumes and in the sets designed by Alex Katz so we can experience these works as they were intended to be performed,” McNeil said.
Dancers in motion brings French impressionist Edgar Degas to mind. The kinetic language of dance does translate as easily into pop art.
“Katz is really brilliant at portraying bodies in motion, especially for an artist associated with the pop art movement and who has such a flat appearance to his forms,” McNeil observed. “You wouldn’t necessarily think those two things go together, but he does it really well.”
The Baker Museum also includes an experiential, interactive piece in the show.
“This large cube, this metal cube was designed for a performance named ‘Polaris,’ and the dancers performed in the cube, in and out and through the cube, and it’s really exciting that we’re able to allow patrons to walk through the cube themselves,” said McNeil with a smile. “This was negotiated as part of the loan so that people can do an interpretative dance in the galleries if they want to in the same format cube that was designed by Alex Katz.”
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“Alex Katz: Theater and Dance” is on view on the second floor of the Baker Museum of Art at Artis Naples through February 2, 2025.
“Alex Katz: Theater and Dance” constitutes the first comprehensive exploration of Katzʼs playful and inventive collaborations with choreographers, dancers and members of avant-garde theater ensembles over six decades. In addition to presenting a range of works by innovators across the performing arts and poetry, it spotlights 15 shows Katz produced with Paul Taylor, exploring the creative partnership that generated some of the most significant postmodern dance and art of the 20th century.
“Katz and Taylor created art that was both playful and enigmatic, and they earned reputations for defying the boundaries of realism in their respective fields,” writes former Katz Consulting Curator Levi Prombaum in the catalog for the show. "The pair continually pushed one another to break modern dance’s conventions of space, narrative, technique and decorum.”
The stop at the Baker Museum of Art represents the exhibition’s only appearance in the Southeast. It is also the only stop that pairs the exhibition with a performance by the Paul Taylor Dance Company.
“There are not many museums in the world that would be able to present an exhibition like this while also, on our same campus, presenting dance of that caliber,” said McNeil.
In conjunction with the performance, there will be a lecture at 1 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 17 by Paul Taylor Dance Company Artistic Director Michael Novak. He will speak about the collaborative spirit that defined Katz’s enduring partnership with the company and which led to his groundbreaking artistic achievements.
“We’re really thrilled to be presenting a lecturer of that caliber in a causal conversation for our museum patrons to enjoy,” said McNeil.
The pieces in the exhibition are visually engaging, but the exhibition as a whole is interesting because it spans Katz’s six-decade career. In the aggregate, they evince Katz’s striking take on the pop art genre.
Katz “fused pop culture imagery, the vigor of abstract expressionism and the compositional strategies of Western classical art to create dramatically distilled representations of modern life,” Prombaum also observes in the exhibition catalog. “When depicting dances he has witnessed, Katz often focuses specifically on the power of the dancers’ gestures.”
“The color palette is very bold, and the pop art style is very much apparent in these works,” said McNeil. “In a number of them, you can see how he’s isolated small elements of the human form, like just a hand or a couple of dancers’ hands that are fragments made into a whole composition for a painting.”
Katz embraced numerous mediums throughout his career. A 1969 work titled “Private Domain 2” is particularly interesting because in it, Katz takes a page from the playbook of such groundbreaking artists as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse by using cutouts of the subject in the painting’s composition.
“In this particular work,” said McNeil, “you can see how Katz has used the cutout technique to create this image of overlapping dancers forms so that you can barely tell where one dancer ends and another one begins. And the sense you get is just one of this fluid movement and collaboration.”
The show additionally includes a 1994 seriograph on paper titled "Pas de Deux." It relates to a five-panel painting of the same name that Esquire magazine commissioned in 1982. What’s significant about the seriograph is that it marked the point in Katz’s career where he began exploring the overlap between art and fashion.
“Here he considers the power of dress up – and the performativity of glamour – by posing several of his chicest artist, poet and writer friends in striking couplings against moody dark backgrounds,” says the label accompanying the piece. “Much like his collaborations with Paul Taylor, the 'Pas de Deux' compositions elevate everyday movements and attire into affecting studies of character and culture.”
The artworks in “Alex Katz: Theater and Dance” 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. It is complemented by unpublished, never-before-exhibited sketches from Katz's collection, major sets and paintings, and rare archival materials from Paul Taylor Dance Company.
Alex Katz: Theater and Dance is organized by the American Federation of the Arts and the Colby College Museum of Art and is curated by guest curator Levi Prombaum. This presentation at the Baker Museum is curated by Dianne Brás-Feliciano, Ph.D., curator of modern art.
Courtney A. McNeil is an award-winning curator, art historian and museum leader with more than two decades of museum and gallery experience. The 2024-25 season is her fifth season with Artis—Naples as museum director and chief curator, where she provides dynamic leadership, artistic vision and strategic direction for The Baker Museum, crafting a vibrant curatorial program that highlights the unique multidisciplinary nature of the organization.
Prior to joining The Baker Museum, McNeil served 15 years in the curatorial department of Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia, ultimately holding the title of chief curator and deputy director for curatorial affairs. At Telfair, she was responsible for overseeing all of the museum’s programmatic activities, including collections, exhibitions and education, at the organization’s three distinct sites.
Earlier in her career, McNeil held positions at Childs Gallery in Boston, where she specialized in American painting and works on paper, and in the publications department of the National Gallery, London.
McNeil has a proven record of championing projects that complicate traditional art historical narratives in order to provide audiences with opportunities for authentic engagement and conversation around the most vital issues of our time. She specializes in aligning the activities of the exhibitions, collections and education teams and implementing data-driven approaches in order to fulfill strategic goals.
She has curated and co-curated a broad range of exhibitions. Her exhibitions have been recognized regionally and nationally with awards and grants from organizations including the Southeastern Museums Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Association of Museums and the Terra Foundation for American Art. A Boston native, Courtney holds a B.A. in English with a minor in art history from Georgetown University and an M.A. in the history of art from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she authored her dissertation on John Singleton Copley’s monumental painting “The Siege of Gibraltar.” She also earned an executive certificate in nonprofit leadership and management from the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
