Laylah Ali

“You don’t need much to make a drawing,” says artist Laylah Ali. “It is an inviting and fairly egalitarian medium.” Ali, who is a professor of art at Williams College, has been drawing and painting figural works for three decades. Her cartoon-style drawings of humanoid forms have attracted particular attention for their balance between levity and “human frailty, murky politics, and other complex combinations,” as Ali puts it. “I deliberately don’t operate in the world of realism. I want my figures to have some possibility of freedom and independence from what traps or binds us in real human bodies.” Her drawings take center stage at a solo retrospective of her work titled Is Anything the Matter? at the Colby College Museum of Art.

Ali begins each drawing with “a general idea in my head, like two figures with one bending over the other one,” she says. “Before I put pen to paper, I know what the energy between the figures [will] be and the power dynamic.” She starts by making simple marks and contours, figuring out the relationship between the figures in the composition, before using hatch marks and other longer “lacerations and punctuations” to fill out the scene. From there, she says, “the way I draw can change even from drawing to drawing in one series. They became more like puzzles to be solved.” She intends themes of race, power, and gender dynamics to be present in all of her work, and each specific drawing is meant to evoke an allegorical scenario. Beyond didacticism, though, she hopes her art “may serve as an invitation to draw—to take the risk of making a mark, of putting one’s feelings, thoughts, and observations into a form that can offer them another mode of thinking and expression,” she says. “The way we live our lives can be so rigid and inflexible, and the act of drawing can offer alternative modes of letting what is in our brains out into the world.”

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