Scratching the surface

Artist Laylah Ali explores the social dynamics that lie beyond appearances

WILLIAMSTOWN - Laylah Ali doesn't let many people into her studio.

"It's a private space," the artist says, welcoming a visitor. "It's like being in my brain. I'm inviting you into my private brain space - the chaos and the mess."

As far as chaos goes, this isn't bad. In the basement of a building on the outskirts of the Williams College campus, where Ali teaches art, an airy studio is filled with white illustrator's tables. Colored pencils and squat bottles of ink clutter the tables. But what catches the eye are the drawings Ali has tacked to the white walls with pushpins: Portraits, made in her signature cartoon style, of haunted figures with garish headdresses, scarification, and false beards, and smaller drawings that feature ruminative lists with oddly adorned figures drawn over them.

The drawings with lists resemble those in "Laylah Ali: Notes/Drawings/Untitled Afflictions," opening at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park tomorrow. Ali is an artist with international cachet; she has shown at the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial and had a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Pointing at a purple-eyed figure hanging in a group of four on her studio wall, Ali exclaims despairingly. "Rachel Lafo said that one looked like me!" Rachel Rosenfield Lafo is the director of curatorial affairs at the DeCordova. "Head sores, underbite, and googly eyes!" Ali laments.

She has none of those. A slender, striking woman with close-cropped black curly hair and glasses, Ali, 40, is a keen observer of how people present themselves to the world and what lies beyond surface appearances: unspoken social communication, the trappings of class and power, and the inevitable revelations of vulnerability that come hand in hand with assertions of strength. It's what her art addresses.

Although much of her work hints at trauma, outright violence doesn't interest her.

"If I shoot someone in the head, we understand that," Ali says. Dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, she sits back in a chair in her studio and chooses her words thoughtfully. "It's the power dynamics that are harder to sniff out - that's where most of our human relationships are - the mid-level, low-level aggression that occurs all the time in our lives."

Growing up in Buffalo as the daughter of an African-American father and a white mother, Ali attuned herself early to social dynamics and covert aggression. The family lived in an all-white neighborhood.

"I was the only black kid in my school," Ali says. "I've been able to negotiate different social places because of that. . . . More people are seeing this now because of Barack Obama, but there have always been biracial people in the US, with the ability to move between these worlds and notice what's different and what's not different.

"I developed heightened powers of observation not just from curiosity," she adds, "but for survival."

As a child, the artist saw implicit judgment many places, and it wasn't always black and white.

"It's not just race. It's also class," Ali points out. "My mom's family had come from some money. It was gone, but they still had the idea of what it's like to have nice silver, a nice oriental rug. They had an aspiration from what they had lost.

"Dad's family was from the farming Mississippi South. He grew up working the land. I keep asking him questions and finding out more things. He walked five miles to school and had no electricity at home."

"My family is very American," she sums up.

The drawings in "Notes/Drawings/Untitled Afflictions" differ from the gouache paintings that brought the artist to the world stage a decade ago. She was living in Somerville then, she says, teaching "fun elective classes" such as creative writing and art history part-time at the Commonwealth School in Boston. She painted in the spare bedroom of her apartment "instead of having a social life," she says.

Ali calls those earlier works her "Greenheads" series. She populated the flat, precise paintings with green-headed figures enacting anxiety-stoked scenes redolent of implied aggression. One of her "Greenheads" paintings is now in the permanent collection at the Institute of Contemporary Art, along with other works by Ali.

"The Greenheads had to do with group dynamics, family, impulses toward violence, and witnessing violence and trauma," the artist says. After making between 80 and 90 Greenheads paintings, Ali found her interest shifting to individual portraiture around 2005. The uniformity of the Greenheads gave way to people with a variety of skin tones, in wild costumes, sometimes with missing or additional limbs or odd growths.

"Negotiating these surface things is an important part of the work," Ali declares of all the costumes and finery. "They're both dead ends and cues. My skin color does tell you something about me, but you don't know until you ask about it."

Dina Deitsch, who organized the DeCordova show, calls that quality "a highly specific ambiguity."

"Her work has always been incredibly rigorous, pushing through ideas, pushing her figures to the limit," says Deitsch, assistant curator at the DeCordova. "There's a play between that rigor and being accessible at the same time."

"There's space built in for a person looking at the work to be of it, and alienated from it," explains Ali. "That's intended, keeping the viewer a little uneasy. You're invited, but it's not entirely a comfortable invitation."

The lists in "Notes/Drawings/Untitled Afflictions" are as odd and provocative as the characters Ali depicts. In one untitled work, a red-clad girl with a fake beard and blond ponytails dashes across the page over this list:

52. Women who have been burned up.

53. Those who have previously had a knife held to the throat.

54. Able to recite the numbers and able to present them effectively.

55. "No one has come close to me."

56. Nevada, Wyoming, South Carolina.

"I wanted to write my thoughts down," Ali explains. "They're my own thoughts, things I might hear on the radio, or my idea of what was said."

"If the characters come from the artist's imagination, these lists of phrases and quotes add a heightened sense of slippery connection to real life," says Lisa Fischman, chief curator of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, where Ali's solo traveling show "Typology" will be on view early next year.

Ali, who double-majored in art and English at Williams, insists that she does not consider herself a writer. Sometimes she hears things she'd like to quote. Sometimes she imagines what people are thinking: "I find your voice irritating," she offers by way of example. "I think my students are thinking that of me."

Ali writes list items down on scraps of paper, then assembles them with care, making a kind of found poem.

"There's something nice about brain to page," she says of the notes. "No race, no female body attached to the lists. It's a freedom of just being a mind working without connection to a body."

The drawings she makes on top are loose and somewhat spontaneous, unlike her paintings, which she meticulously plots out. Both sport characters that resemble cartoons. She allows that the more graphic styles of artists such as Ida Applebroog and Philip Guston, later in his career, may have been early influences, but she'd rather talk about another.

"TV had a huge influence," Ali concedes. "My generation was completely saturated with TV. It was my best friend, my pet, my brother, my sister. I grew up looking at a two-dimensional screen all the time: 'Scooby Doo,' 'Love Boat,' Vietnam imagery. 'Roots' was very disturbing. So many things follow on the flat rectangle. I like that as a stage."

Ali and her husband, elementary school teacher Michael Nixon, don't own a TV now. It may be that for Ali, her own imagination provides more than enough drama and intrigue. She appreciates the latitude her success has given her, but she doesn't thrive on recognition.

"Some artists are driven by the idea that their work has to be seen," Ali reflects. "I'm more interested in what happens in the studio. It's a great privilege to let the life of my mind have some time to itself."