Laylah Ali

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Laylah Ali has collaborated with dancer/ choreographer Dean Moss at The Kitchen in 2005 with Figures on a Field and in 2014 with johnbrown. 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:

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 Washington University in St. Louis, MO. She lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and is currently a professor at Williams College.

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