Contemporary artist Laylah Ali uses drawing in a way that is distinct and separate from her approach to painting, to depict scenes that are less narrative, less violent, and more playful than those in her paintings. In this paper I will primarily discuss Ali’s 1998 drawing, located in the Smith College Museum of Art, titled B Drawing, as well as her Greenheads series of paintings.  I will contrast her use of two media, drawing and gouache, and explore how she uses them differently to portray issues of race, gender, violence and power.

Ali was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1968. She had a mild interest in art as a child, but it wasn’t until she went to college that she decided to officially pursue it. Ali received her degree in Studio Art and English from Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1991, and went on to receive her MFA from Washington University in Missouri. Ali cites bad television, in particular the flatness and color palette of old television cartoons, as an influence on her  work and the work of others in her generation. She moved from the cartoon imagery she grew up with to more complex sources of inspiration. Ali clips images and headlines from newspapers, and keeps them in detailed and labeled files, using these clips to find patterns in the news and world, but also for assistance in drawing specific gestures and facial features. Ali is also interested in how people interact in these photos, and has said “I’m usually interested in the power dynamic of the story in the photo.”((1)) Ali uses these images to inform her work, but she isn’t making work directly inspired by her surroundings, using a more drawn out process where things inform her and are then expressed through the work. For this reason Ali feels she can’t talk about what a work is about while it’s still in progress, but rather prefers to make something, then step away and process it, after which she is able to talk about it.((2))

In B Drawing,((3)) Ali uses a traditional drawing medium, pencil, as well as watercolor, to depict a scene that is more playful, less narrative, and less deliberately ambiguous, as compared to her series entitled Greenheads, which we will explore later. The drawing consists of eight brown figures with large ball-shaped heads, spread out along the border of the paper in various positions and sizes. All eight figures are wearing white outfits, though it is unclear if these are tank tops, bathing suits, or some sort of superhero costume (a possible reference to comic books and cartoons). Some of the figures wear belts, and some have thin black masks covering their eyes, though they are still able to see since we can see their eyes through slits in the mask. The figures are essentially genderless, although some wear two piece outfits while others wear one piece, which could possibly be interpreted as a gendered difference. All figures have their mouths open, although not all in the same way: seven of the figures are baring their teeth in an ambiguous smile or growl, three have their tongues hanging out, while some have both bared teeth and a dangling tongue. Gravity is semi-suspended in this work, the figures on the left side are all upright, but the figure at the top right seems to be hanging upside-down, threatening to fall. There are no interactions between the figures except for the two at the bottom, who are in some sort of confrontation. One of the two has his hand in the other’s mouth, seemingly being bitten by the figure on the left. The left figure has a slanted eye shape, indicating anger, while the right figure has spherical eyes indicating surprise, so it can be presumed that the left figure is the aggressor and the right is the victim. The heads of these figures have almost no detailing, except for extremely tiny detailed teeth.

The heads of the figures are drawn with colored pencil, while the bodies are done in watercolors.  The white suits that they wear are the original paper left blank, as opposed to being sketched in with any type of white medium. The watercolor of the bodies is opaque, almost resembling acrylic, or Ali’s more typical medium of gouache. The sketching of the colored pencil on the heads is obvious, and there is a distinct textual difference between the heads and the bodies. For almost all eight of these figures, it’s impossible to read the expressions on their faces. A viewer can speculate, but there are very little signs or clues to help.  This ambiguity is a key component of Ali’s style, represented here in the ambiguity of facial expressions. Another aspect that is repeated in later works is the mirroring of the spherical shape of the head in the nostrils and eyes of the figures.

For further evidence of Ali’s drawing style we can look at another Ali work titled B Drawing, made in 1996 from gouache and pencil on paper, which has similar characters to the Smith B Drawing, specifically, two figures in the same white outfits, with the same large ball-shaped heads. These figures have different shades of brown heads, but the same shade of body, and the same tall black socks. The left figure has a very long tongue sticking out of its mouth, and its eyes have a flat top, giving it a sad and dismayed expression, with its arms limp at its side. The right figure looks angry, portrayed through almond shaped eyes and an open, toothy mouth. It seems to be pointing and yelling at a spot on the ground, or possibly something out of frame that the viewer can’t see. In both B Drawings, Ali is introducing characters but no narrative. The characters raise questions, but fairly simplistic ones. Ali has used drawing as the medium to make these fairly simplistic works, and she consciously calls them Drawings. Ali’s use of drawing materials to portray cartoonish and playful scene draws on a rich history of drawing.

To understand how Ali’s drawings fit into the greater context of the medium, it is useful to look at the way that drawing as evolved as a skill and as a form of art. Up until the late 1900’s learning to be an artist meant, first and foremost, going to art school to learn how to draw.((4)) Not only was education widely regarded as the first step to being an artist, but it was seen as a continual learning process. Artists were expected to be constantly continuing to learn and improving their skills, to the point that it was almost a grueling practice: “the motto nulla dies sine linea [never a day without a line] therefore encompasses a huge range of contradictory ideologies from desire to punishment. The elevation of hard work into a ruling obsession … became one of the defining traits of the fully fledged romantic artist.”((5)) While drawing is still widely practiced today, it isn’t held in the same high regard, and is often seen more as an unfinished, preparatory medium.

There are, however, some forms of drawing that are seen as more than simply preparatory, such as the rich history of caricature drawings, especially as humorous or mocking social commentary, and it may be here that Ali’s approach fits best.((6)) “The prevalence of social commentary in broadsheets and political prints in the eighteenth century is surpassed only by the proliferation of journals in the nineteenth century publishing satirical caricatures and narrative ‘cartoon’ sequence.”((7)) Caricatures were often used in social commentary, were seen as some of the earliest examples of cartoons and comics, and were thought to show more truth than real life, presumably because caricatures tend to make internal characteristics external.((8)) In her work, Ali uses the visual language of cartoons, comics, and to some extent caricatures, while also directly subverting core principles of these drawing forms, which we see in her B Drawings.

Ali’s drawings have a number of parallels with caricature work as well. Some of these parallels include her social commentary, as well as the violent, grotesque aspect that is heavily used in caricatures. However, Ali rejects a number of important aspects of caricature art. Visually, her figures are quite different than a caricature. Rather than greatly exaggerating aspects of the body, Ali does the opposite and standardizes her characters, so much so that they lose any aspect of individuality. Caricatures are traditionally biting yet humorous. But upon being asked about humor in her work, Ali said that she doesn’t see humor as the right word, and that her paintings work more in the absurd than the humorous.((9)) Any humor comes after the fact, rather than during the making of the work. Finally, there is also a deep history of using caricatures in a racist fashion against African Americans, over-exaggerating features to separate and dehumanize non-white people. Artist and illustrator C.M. Campbell tackles this topic in his poignant comic for online art magazine Hyperallergic called How to Draw a Black Guy:

“I want to touch on exaggerated features. If the black guy’s features are consistent with the setting it feels natural and distinguished. But if the features contrast the settings the black guy comes across as laughable and buffoonish.”((10))

Although her Greenheads series, which I explore below, makes references to racist and racial history, such as through KKK robes and nooses, Ali rejects the stereotypical depiction of black people altogether, preferring to have other aspects of the work speak to race.

It is interesting to compare Ali’s drawings with her approach to paintings, which use some similar images and themes yet to different effect.  Ali created her Greenheads series of paintings between 1996 and 2005 with a look that is similar to the B Drawing figures. All Greenheads figures are set on a blue background, with green heads rather than brown heads. If B Drawing raises few questions about narrative, Greenheads addresses serious subjects and issues, bringing in themes of violence, power, and race.  For example, Untitled, made in 1996 in gouache on paper, is made of three panels: one long horizontal panel with two squares underneath it. In the top panel there are three figures. All three figures are torsos stuck onto wooden posts, with their bottom halves and arms from the elbow down cut off. All three have the traditional green head, black masks over their eyes, and brown bodies. They are looking in three different directions, and all wear black belts strung across their chests. In the bottom left panel are two similar figures, both wearing blue and white striped bodysuits with black belts around their waists and black masks covering their eyes and head. Both of these figures hold up wooden sticks, appearing to be the same wooden sticks that the top panel figures are stuck on, but not connected through the break in panels. The bottom right panel also has two figures, wearing the same striped shirts as the left panel and the same black eye masks as the top panel. These figures are also holding sticks, and these sticks too don’t connect with the top panel. All three panels in the work have a bright, sky blue background. A number of questions about narrative, character roles, time and space settings are raised for the viewer, and Ali makes no attempt to answer them.

In her essay on Ali’s exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Suzanne Wise describes Ali’s comic book-esque drawings as such: “creating a world with a fake blue sky, stick figured alien-heads, a white platform earth and cinematic cropping of characters, Ali references the mediums of film, TV and comic strip. The ‘low culture’ art forms that kids love, the first and only art forms for many.”((11)) Although Ali says she is not especially well versed in the comic and cartoon world, she does use similar visual language and semiotics. The bright colors and simplified body shapes that Wise mentions are the largest similarity, however the separation of a work into multiple panels, such as the Greenheads Untitled discussed earlier, is also reminiscent of a comic book. However Ali’s Greenheads series also blatantly rejects some aspects of cartoon and comic art, primarily in its lack of narrative. While the objective of comic books is to provide an illustration to a narrative, Ali’s work suggests a narrative but does not fulfill it.

Ali has said that in Greenheads she wanted to created figures that act as a question mark.((12)) This question mark can be a stand in for a number of questions: what is it? Who is it? Why is it doing that? The Greenheads are often depicted in scenes that are both violent and ambiguous. It is usually unclear who is the victim and who is the perpetrator. Ali gives the audience clues to certain aspects of the scenes, but often these clues bring up more questions, rather than answer them. These clues can consist of props like belts, which have a domestic violence connotation, or signals of racial violence, like robes that resemble those worn by the Ku Klux Klan, and nooses. Ali is fascinated by dodgeball, a school game that targets the weakest in the class, and often will includes characters holding dodgeballs, as a symbol of that violence. These clues, however, are easy to be misread. Such is the case with the dodgeballs, which were widely mistaken to be basketballs, a symbol entrenched in the African American community, despite having no indication as such. While Ali’s earlier work focused more about on the moment of violence, her later work in the Greenheads is more interested in the moments before and after violence.

A crucial difference a viewer might notice between Ali’s Greenheads and her drawings is medium. Greenheads are painted in gouache, which Ali finds can be extremely frustrating and finicky to work with, but with a preferable outcome, more velvety and soft than an acrylic. The Smith B Drawing is done in colored pencil and watercolor, both much quicker materials. About the difference in medium Ali has said: “my hands would have preferred to make loose, expressive, large paintings – but that is not what they needed to do, not in the case of these paintings…drawings, for me, are usually more spontaneous.”((13)) We can see that Ali is experiencing these two media differently, and using them to express different subject matters and emotions in these works.

For further comparison between Ali’s painting style and drawing style, we can look at her other drawing series. After Greenheads Ali went on to do a series entitled Note Drawings, which is a series of drawings in ink, colored pencil, ballpoint and gouache on paper, that incorporate heads and figures layered with writing in Ali’s own script. In her book The Primacy of Drawing, Deanna Petherbridge explains that “the practice of illustrating letters with drawings, where the pen moves so readily between text and illustration, is a crucial connection in the verbal and visual puns of caricature located within the intermediate and hybrid zone of graphism.”((14)) Ali draws on this tradition in her Note Drawings, which integrate text and drawing into one work to the point of blurring the line between the two. The characters in Note Drawings, reference the Greenheads, but mark a departure from that work. Now they are not ambiguous in race or gender, but quite explicit. The handwritten notes, taken from a list of non-sequitur thoughts from the artist, add a textual component that isn’t present in the entirely two dimensional Greenheads. “Despite the apparently haphazard nature of the texts (they are drawn from the artist’s collection of phrases, jotted down on scraps of paper) the notes are thoughtfully selected and composed with an almost poetic attention to rhythm and syntax.”((15)) The thread of violence remains in Note Drawings, but while the Greenheads was about group dynamics, these move toward exploring one-on-one dynamics. Ali has spoken about her desire to use her voice again being a driving factor for Note Drawings, which directly incorporate the artist’s voice. Again, Ali is using a drawing medium to produce work that is less carefully composed, and closer to the artist’s mind and hand. There is a long tradition of drawing being the medium closest to the artist’s thoughts and emotions, and by incorporating handwritten notes she even further gives the audience a glimpse into the artists mind.

In all of her work, but most prominently her B Drawings and Greenheads, Ali is interested in the power of violence, and the power of witnessing violence. The artist has said “I think of myself and many of the characters in my paintings as observers of the misdeeds that go on. They often do not intervene but they see what goes on, and that has  psychological ramifications.”((16)) Ali creates figures, and places them in violent scenes, but gives them no verbal outlet. A verbal outlet is not the only thing that Ali removes though, she experiments in the Greenheads with removing various body parts and gestures. Ali is interested in experimenting with power in the body, and how much she can remove while still creating a figure of power obvious to the viewer.

Both the violence and power aspects of Ali’s drawings have a racial component. In the Smith B Drawing, race is more outright, as the heads of the figures are more naturalistic and all have slight variations, meaning the figures are existing in a world that has multiple races. While the characters in Greenheads seem to exist in a world without race, both the Greenheads and the figures in the Smith B Drawing have brown bodies. On creating the Greenheads with brown bodies, Ali has said that “they are brown because I need to examine why them being brown adds these layers of meaning that don’t exist otherwise.”((17)) She is interested in exploring the idea that a painting full of exclusively white people might be seen as having no racial themes, and yet a painting full of brown people can’t be seen this way. Ali incorporates various racial aspects in the works, but doesn’t outright identify their race, to explore how this changes how they are viewed.

The B Drawings generally invite fewer questions about narrative than is the case with the Greenheads, although they raise some similar themes. Although the Greenheads series doesn’t include a narrative, it raises questions about one, while the B Drawings do not. The Smith B Drawing’s characters are less interactive with each other, and they act fairly independently of anything else going on in the work. The figure in the diving position on the left is reminiscent of a superhero, which relates back to Ali’s comment about bystanders witnessing violence. While a superhero is someone who is active in a scene of violence, rather than being a passive bystander, the figure at the top right reminiscent of the movie (or perhaps the television cartoon program) trope of someone dangling from a cliff, at the mercy of the person standing on top of the cliff, which is a trope that explores the balance of power and violence. Finally, the two characters at the bottom are engaging in an obvious act of violence, in that one is biting the hand of the other. However, none of these characters invite the same questions as the Greenheads. The diving figure on the left is not certainly enough a superhero, the figure dangling from the top has no adversary with which to build a narrative, and in the case of the two figures at the bottom, it’s obvious to the viewer who is the aggressor and who is the victim. And while the Greenheads are often holding props, these figures in the Smith B Drawing have nothing.

Lydia Yee posed important questions in her article Brown Heads, Green Bodies: “if in the Greenheads’ world, gender and race do not exist or operate in expected ways, what kind of power structure is at work? What is the source of all the violent impulses?”((18)) Ali intended for the audience to ask themselves these prodding questions when looking at the Greenheads, questions that just aren’t raised to the same effect in the Smith B Drawing. The B Drawings in general are more spontaneous and have fewer layers, as Ali said “because they are not so studied, they can capture something I didn’t anticipate, and they are more playful than the paintings, and more enjoyable to make.”((19)) By using a traditional drawing medium to express a more playful and spontaneous subject matter, Ali is drawing from a deep historical tradition of drawing.

By examining Smith’s B Drawing in comparison to Ali’s other drawings, as well as her paintings, we are able to see how Ali has used drawing to portray something distinctly different than painting, continuing the historical tradition. Looking at the Smith B Drawing can evoke some really strong reactions, ranging from laughter to recoiling. Ali’s ability to do this with a medium like drawing, in a style that seems so simple, is what inspires so many questions. Although Greenheads, had a bigger critical response, it is clear from study that Ali does not view her drawings as lesser, but rather a chance to express something different.

 

((1)) Ali, Laylah, Deborah Menaker Rothschild. Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series. Williamstown: Williams College Museum of Art, 2012. Pg 8.

((2)) “Art in the 21st Century: Laylah Ali in “Power”.” September 16, 2005.

((3)) In this paper, the drawing will be referred to as the “Smith B Drawing,” as there are several other works by Ali also called B Drawing.

((4)) Petherbridge, Deanna. The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice. New Haven (Conn.): Yale University Press, 2014.

((5)) Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing. 216

((6)) Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing

((7)) Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing. 348

((8)) Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing.

((9)) Ali and Rothschild, Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series.

((10)) Campbell, CM. “How to Draw a Black Guy.” Hyperallergic. April 10, 2018. Accessed April 15, 2018. https://hyperallergic.com/432066/draw-black-guy/.

((11)) Ali, Laylah. Laylah Ali: Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, April 18-July 1, 2001. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2001. Pg. 9

((12)) Ali, Laylah. Laylah Ali: Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

((13)) Ali and Rothschild, Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series. Pg. 19

((14)) Ali, Laylah. Laylah Ali: Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

((15)) Ali, Laylah. Laylah Ali: Note Drawings. Lincoln, MA: Decordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 2008. Pg. 3

((16)) Isaac, Allen, and Laylah Ali. “Here Comes the Kiss: A Conversation Between Laylah Ali and Allan Isaac.” The Massachusetts Review 49, no. 1 (Spring 2008). Pg. 156

((17)) Isaac and Ali. “Here Comes the Kiss: A Conversation Between Laylah Ali and Allan Isaac.”

((18)) Yee, Lydia. “Brown Skin, Green Heads.” Art in Print Review 7, no. 3 (December 2002) Pg. 47

((19)) “Art in the 21st Century: Laylah Ali in “Power”.” September 16, 2005.