Laylah Ali

Laylah Ali
Born	Buffalo, New York
Nationality	American
Education	1994 M.F.A., Washington University in St. Louis, MO 1993 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME 1992 Whitney Independent Study Program, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1991 B.A., Williams College, Williamstown, MA
Known for	Painting
Notable work	The Greenheads Series
Style	Gouache
Awards	2008 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant 2007 United States Artists Fellowship 2002 William H. Johnson Prize 2001 Premio Regione Piemonte (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per L’Arte, Turin, Italy) 2000 ICA Artist Prize (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts)

1994 M.F.A., Washington University in St. Louis, MO 1993 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME 1992 Whitney Independent Study Program, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

2008 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant 2007 United States Artists Fellowship 2002 William H. Johnson Prize 2001 Premio Regione Piemonte (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per L’Arte, Turin, Italy)

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.

In her youth, Ali originally intended to be a lawyer or a doctor. She received her B.A. (English and Studio Art) from Williams College, Williamstown, MA and her M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, MO. She lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She is currently a professor at Williams College.

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. 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 are no room for mistakes. Ali says she will one brush for one color and will label the brushes so there is no cross contamination amongst brushes. Ali's work is based on life experiences. Although you 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."

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."

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

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