Portrait of the Artist: Laylah Ali

Noelani Kirschner, The American Scholar, February 16, 2026

“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.
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