Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures sheds new light on the pivotal work of African American choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings (American, 1944-2015). Through a unique movement vocabulary that she called “moving pictures,” Cummings made dance that combined the visual imagery of photography and the kinetic energy of movement to explore the emotional details of daily rituals, as well as the intimacy of black home life. Cummings is considered a foundational figure in dance for her ability to bridge postmodern dance experimentation and black dance traditions.

The exhibition draws largely from Cummings’ personal video archive of rarely seen works. Alongside performance documentation, the exhibition features interviews, photographs, and her lesser-known dance films. Together they reveal the artist’s commitment to multidisciplinary art-making that often combined dance with elements of theater, text, photography, and the moving image.

Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures began as a collaboration between Art + Practice and the Getty Research Institute’s African American Art History Initiative. Cummings’ video archive is in the special collections of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of New York Public Library.

This exhibition was co-organized by Art + Practice and the Getty Research Institute, and cocurated by Kristin Juarez, Research Specialist; Rebecca Peabody, Head, Research Projects & Academic Outreach; and Glenn Phillips, Senior Curator, Head of Exhibitions, and Head of Modern & Contemporary Collections, with curatorial and research assistance from Samantha Gregg and Alex Jones. The presentation of this exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center was organized by Elise Butterfield, Curator of Exhibitions at DCASE.

Special acknowledgement is given to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of New York Public Library and the Blondell Cummings Estate.