Edges of Ailey is the first large-scale museum exhibition to celebrate the life, dances, influences, and enduring legacy of visionary artist and choreographer Alvin Ailey (b. 1931, Rogers, Texas; d. 1989, New York, New York).

The Houston Museum of African American Culture presents Ellsworth Ausby: Odyssey, a posthumous exhibition of paintings by the artist Ellsworth Ausby who died in Brooklyn in 2011. The HMAAC exhibition primarily focuses on the Afrofuturist abstract painter's work on cut canvas from the 1970s which embodies his vibrant geometric forms that reflect his achievement of liberating the canvas from rigid structures, allowing them to float freely on the walls and spaces they occupy.

In 1972, this Afrofuturist abstract painter—who died in Brooklyn in 2011—wrote of his desire to “mirror the dynamo of our antecedent heritage despite the temerarious and presumptuous canons of the established art world.” Those poetic words introduce the artist’s current show, at the Eric Firestone gallery, echoing the blazing refinement, the style, and the priorities of the vivid works on view, made between 1969 and 1979. Ausby introduced the forms and the palette of traditional African art into both the geometric sensibility of American hard-edge painting and, later, the post-minimalist sensuality of the Pattern and Decoration movement. The earliest pieces here, including the exhilarating “Moving It,” from 1970, suggest enlarged swatches of kente cloth. In subsequent multipart compositions—such as “Shabazz,” from 1974, with its rich hues and pointed barbell silhouette—Ausby liberated the canvas from its stretchers to stunning effect. These works seem to float, kitelike, on the white walls, giving fresh meaning to the exhibition’s title, which is borrowed from a Sun Ra song: “Somewhere in Space.”