SAN DIEGO (Press Release) — The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) from August 21, 2025–January 4, 2026 will present its newest exhibition “Alex Katz: Theater and Dance,” 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 touring exhibition showcases nearly 90 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 15 productions that Katz produced with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, exploring the creative partnership that produced some of the most significant postmodern dance of the twentieth century.
It 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.
Alex Katz, born in 1927, is a New York-based painter and printmaker, specializing in boldly simplified portraits and landscapes. Since 1951, Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. He is widely regarded
for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colors are considered to be precursors to Pop Art.
The exhibition, presented in collaboration with the American Federation of Arts, was organized by the Colby College Museum of Art. Artworks from the show are drawn from their comprehensive Alex Katz holdings, which is
home to a collection of nearly 900 works by the artist. These are complemented by unpublished, never-before-exhibited sketches from the
artist’s collection, major sets and paintings, and rare archival materials from
the Paul Taylor Dance Company. Other key loans attest 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 debuted in Fall 2024 at Artis–Naples, The Baker Museum in Naples, Florida. The show will travel to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington, before arriving in San Diego in August.
“By including a historical range of paintings and rarely seen sketches and support material, this exhibition provides visitors a view into the creative ferment of one of America’s most lauded painters. From a 1964 monochromatic backdrop to the high-keyed color in his recent series,
Dancers, the exhibition reveals how Alex Katz continued to find inspiration and energy in the words of poetry and the movement of dance.”- Kathryn Kanjo, Director & CEO, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
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Preceding provided by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego