Carl Little: Laylah Ali’s Activations

In a statement on the Joan Mitchell Foundation website, Laylah Ali offers this note on her art: “My work deals with the amalgam of race, power, gendering, ambition, human frailty, murky politics, and the other complex combinations that we so often treat as separate entities.” Is Anything the Matter? Drawings by Laylah Ali at the Colby College Museum of Art bears out this self-appraisal by way of a provocative and compelling array of images.

The exhibition also highlights Ali’s interest in combining the textual and the visual. Her messages are complicated and refuse cut-and-dry readings.

In the earliest work in the show, from Ali’s Self-Portrait with Nat Turner’s Vision series (1993–94, started while in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture), the statement, “Because it is beginning to look nothing like me, I shoot and kill the vision,” accompanies a drawing of an androgynous figure, hands in the air, as if surrendering.

Reflecting on the visionary preacher who led a successful slave rebellion in Virginia in August 1851, Ali explores, in her words, “how this kind of vision, which is often violent in nature and has the goal to change the course of history, has been usually presented as primarily gendered male in its drive and focus.” Writing in The Massachusetts Review, scholar Olivia Haynes noted how these drawings “do not function as declarations of prophecy but rather as acts of witnessing, exploring how the past inhabits the present and how we position ourselves within its weight.”

Another reference to vision appears in one of the drawings in Ali’s Superman series (2000). Flying side by side, two red-caped figures converse, one of them claiming of his companion, “You are the only one with a clear-headed vision of the future,” to which the second replies, “Stop.” The edgy dialogue belies the comic-book appearance of the thin-limbed superheroes.

In her Note Drawings (2008), Ali inscribed numbered lists across diverse visages. The connection between the scribbled words and the faces is not obvious. What, for example, is the significance of number 314, “Consultation with aforementioned—and previously unknown—witch doctors to arrange for highly specific revenge,” to the masked sad-eyed girl whose face bears the scrawled note?

Invited to respond to the Octavia Butler archives at the Huntington Library, Ali created a series of Commonplace drawings that illustrate diverse writings from the celebrated science fiction writer’s commonplace books. For Butler’s description of an unnamed activist—“she knows what she wants, and will have it, no matter what—total commitment”—Ali uses black contour lines to depict a determined woman with piercing eyes.

In a 2016 profile in Art New England, writer Sarah Baker asked Ali why she makes art. “It’s an electrical necessity,” she answered. Her paintings, writes Baker, “are a place to ask questions,” adding, “When she doesn’t make art, the behaviors she doesn’t love spill over.” The artist, she avers, would rather “act it out” in her paintings—and, one might add, in her remarkable drawings.

 

Via email, Ali answered questions that draw from this issue’s theme description.

CL: How has this verbal/visual practice evolved in your work?

LA: I started as an English major [at Williams College] who wrote poetry as an undergraduate, and then I moved into visual arts using text. Gradually, I moved away from any textual involvement so I could concentrate on sharpening my visual imagery to the point where I could express everything I needed to say without text. But my love of language caused words to slowly creep back into the work at times. So I go back-and-forth.

CL: What compels you to integrate words into your art?

LA: I should say that I go through periods where I don’t use words in my art, like my Greenhead series and Typology series. So sometimes, when I do use words, it’s because they feel insistent, like they are coming into my head and can’t be denied, which the Nat Turner drawings are an example of.

But there are different ways that I use text. In my Note Drawings, those words came from a range of sources, including overheard conversations and news reports on the radio. And they became arranged into lists, so the process was more conscious. For the Commonplace Drawings, the journal writings of Octavia Butler became a springboard for the imagery, which was quite personal, from my own experiences. That project was the result of an invitation to make artwork based on interacting with Butler’s archives.

CL: How do you see the verbal and the visual working together? What do you seek to achieve by combining them?

LA: I think it depends on the project. Sometimes the verbal is in service to the image, like political cartoons. Sometimes text can be wildly unaffiliated with the imagery in a tension-producing way. Sometimes text serves as a recognizable entrance for people, but it doesn’t mean that it should be taken as the truth. We need only think about all of the words that are spoken to us in our lives that we should question.

CL: Do you think that the presence of words enhances the efficacy of an image?

LA: Again, it depends on the particular project. I think we’ve all seen things where the text feels unnecessary or redundant. I think the viewer can sense if the text is being used in a way to tell the viewer things that they could understand without being overtold.

 

Is Anything the Matter? Drawings by Laylah Ali runs through 19 April 2026 at the Colby College Museum of Art. The show originated at the Marion Art Gallery, SUNY Fredonia, and traveled to the University Museum of Contemporary Art, UMass Amherst, before making its final stop in Waterville. Featured in the “art21” series, she has shown her work nationally and internationally. More of Ali’s art can be found on her website.