| Description |
NOTE: THIS ARTIST'S BOOK IS HELD IN BALTIC ARCHIVE NOT THE LIBRARY. Please email archive@balticmill.com for an appointment or see staff.
Laylah Ali's gouache-and-ink drawings previously only implied violence, but here her interrupted narratives and pared-down, comic-book aesthetic present a perilous world where a wounded civilization and psychology meet. Psychopolitical situations are frozen in individual frames, populated by figures dressed in costumes derived from superheroes and prison guards, their limbs hacked off, their faces mangled, their bodies bandaged and their necks hung by nooses at the end of page-long ropes. Also taking up issues of gender and race, these drawings offer only the most uncomfortable conclusions.
Published by Museum of Modern Art, New York.
About the Artist
The precision with which Ali creates her small, figurative, gouache paintings on paper is such that it takes her many months to complete a single work. Her most famous and longest-running series of paintings depict brown-skinned and gender-neutral Greenheads and have been included in the Venice Biennale (2003), and the Whitney Biennial (2004) and were the subject of a major touring exhibition in 2012-2013 that originated at the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA and traveled to the Weisman Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. 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, IL; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among many others. |