Laylah Ali

Laylah Ali (born 1968 ) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.

In her youth, Ali originally intended to be a lawyer or a doctor.

Ali received her B.A. (English and Studio Art) from Williams College, Williamstown, MA in 1991.

She participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City in 1992, and completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME in 1993.

Ali received her M.F.A. in 1994 from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

She lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and is currently a professor at Williams College.

In Ali's earlier work, she would draw or paint something violent.

She focused more on the action than the violence itself.

In her current work, there is not a lot of focus on the act; she is more attentive to what happens before and after.

Laylah's work had a unique feature of including a level of emotion.

She uses bright colors and cartoons to portray current events and socio-political ideas.

She uses this unique approach of not using a specific event, so the audience can think through the art and have their own perception.

The works are small scale gouache paintings and drawings on paper.

She is known to prepare for many months, planning out every detail so there is no room for mistakes.

Ali's work is based on life experiences.

Although one may not be able to tell, she says all of her work holds meaning and that what's in her mind transcends from her hands on paper.

About the performative nature of her work, Ali says, "The paintings can be like crude stages or sets, the figures like characters in a play. I think of them equally as characters and figures."

Ali's work included an artistic lens of caricature.

According to Charlotte Seaman, "Ali’s work is not grounded in the academic tradition, however it is informed by the rich history of caricature, especially as humorous or mocking social commentary".

Ali used a unique idea of caricature, Seaman states "Ali uses the visual language of cartoons, comics, and to some extent caricatures. Notably, though, her work is opposed to racial caricature in that it does not exaggerate features of an individual – rather the opposite: it turns individuals into signs or ciphers of generalized (though still racialized) human experience"

The subject of Ali's most well-known gouache paintings are the Greenheads – characters designed to minimize or eliminate categorical differences of gender, height, age, and in some ways race.

Ali created more than 80 of these paintings between 1996 and 2005.

Ali drew on imagery and topics from newspapers, such as images of protest signs or world leaders hugging, but tweaked the stories in order to create something distant and new.

Ali designed the characters and images to be specific and yet vague.

They have meaning from Ali herself but the viewer brings their own references to interpret the image as well.

Ali designed the characters to look human-like but not quite human so that they would be removed from our world and social context.

They have a socio-political meaning yet they exist outside of our world.

In 2002, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, commissioned Ali to create a wordless graphic novelette.

Laylah Ali has exhibited in both the Venice Biennial (2003) and the Whitney Biennial (2004).

Other exhibitions are as follows:

Laylah Ali has collaborated with dancer and choreographer Dean Moss at The Kitchen in 2005 with figures on a field and in 2014 with johnbrown.

Ali has been awarded a number of grants, residencies and awards, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2008, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Residency in 2018, and the United States Artists Residency.

Since 2015, Ali has been working on a series of paintings she calls Acephalous, featuring figures she describes as gender conscious, potentially sexual or sexualized, some of which have racial characteristics and some of which do not have heads.

"They are on an endless, determined trek, a multi-part journey," she says.

"It has elements of a forced migration."

In 2020 during the pandemic Ali was expected to complete a project with the Tamarind Press in New Mexico.

The safety measures of COVID-19 demanded that the press and artist shift their working relationship to a virtual one.

Instead of a project in-person they worked to utilize the mail to send work-in-progress back and forth.

Ali’s works are included in the permanent collections of numerous public institutions, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among many others.