17 Facts About Laylah Ali

Laylah Ali was born on 1968 and is an American contemporary visual artist.

Laylah Ali is known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.

Laylah Ali lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and is a professor at Williams College.

Laylah Ali 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.

Laylah Ali focused more on the action than the violence itself.

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

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

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

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

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

Laylah 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.

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

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

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

Laylah Ali's works are included in the permanent collection of numerous public institutions, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Whitney Museum in New York City.

Laylah Ali has exhibited in both the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial.

Laylah 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, the United States Artists Fellowship, as well as being honored as an artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College, Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.