Laylah Ali was born in
Buffalo, New York in 1968, and lives and works
in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Williams
College and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
The
precision with which Ali creates her small figurative gouache paintings
on paper is such that it takes her many months to complete a single
work. She meticulously plots out in advance every aspect of her
work, from subject matter to choice of color and the brushes that
she will use. In style, her paintings resemble comic-book serials,
but they also contain stylistic references to hieroglyphics and
American folk-art traditions. Ali often achieves a high level of
emotional tension in her work as a result of juxtaposing brightly
colored scenes with dark, often violent subject matter that speaks
of political resistance, social relationships, and betrayal. Although
Ali’s interest in representations of socio-political issues
and current events drives her work, her finished paintings rarely
reveal specific references. Her most famous and longest-running
series of paintings depicts the brown-skinned and gender-neutral
Greenheads, while her most recent works include portraits as well
as more abstract biomorphic images. Ali endows the characters and
scenes in her paintings with everyday attributes like dodge balls,
sneakers, and band-aids as well as historically- and culturally-loaded
signs such as nooses, hoods, robes, masks, and military-style uniforms.
Her drawings, to which she refers as ‘automatic’, are
looser and more playful than the paintings and are often the source
of material that she explores more deeply in her paintings. Laylah
Ali has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York;
ICA, Boston; MCA Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and
MASS MoCA, among others. Her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale
(2003) and the Whitney Biennial (2004).
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
303 Gallery, New York | Miller Block Gallery, Boston
Laylah Ali on the Art21 blog |
