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. 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 generated some of the most significant postmodern dance and art of the twentieth century. 

Since the late 1950s, Alex Katz has painted dancers and designed sets and costumes for theater and dance productions. As the first comprehensive museum presentation of Katzʼs highly collaborative and playful work with choreographers, dancers, and members of avant-garde theater ensembles, Alex Katz: Theater and Dance offers an unparalleled opportunity to experience Katzʼs designs and creative process. 

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at the Colby College Museum of Art, home to a collection of nearly 900 works by the artist, and complemented by unpublished, never before exhibited sketches from the artistʼs collection, major sets and paintings, and rare archival materials from Paul Taylor Dance Company, among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 stage design in Katzʼs works. 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 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.