"Untitled," from the Greenheads series," 2005.
This fall, the Studio Museum in Harlem takes a look into the future with a group show featuring over 60 works by 29 artists. The Shadows Took Shape opens on November 14th, but it's not about jet packs or Tomorrowland. The exhibition explores Afrofuturism, a word coined by Mark Dery in his 1994 anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, and it's also inspired by the music of the legendary jazz musician, poet and philosopher Sun Ra.Laylah Ali, whose black and white Typology Series is featured in the show, is curious to see how its curators -- and the other artists -- define Afrofuturism. "Certainly being African American or having brown skin is one lens that I look at things through. But I don't think I have a very idealistic idea of the future." She describes her work as conflating past, present and future. "You could be looking at something that was referring to history or it could be projecting forward into the future, but it all relies very much on my present," Ali says.
After studying at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City she got her M.F.A. at Washington University in St. Louis and, by the late '90s, her series of paintings known as Greenheads began attracting international acclaim. In 2002, she illustrated a 36-page book for the Museum of Modern Art using her Greenhead figures: sexless, stick-thin characters that are often depicted in superheroesque masks and headdresses, and include themes of war, power and weakness -- but, so far, she hasn't ventured deeper into the world of sequential narrative or graphic novels.
"Untitled," pieces from Ali's Typology series, 2005.
Though she doesn't own a television, Ali says she was influenced by a childhood spent in front of the tube. "Watching things on a rectangular screen 15 years of your life influences how you frame things, especially when you're thinking about telling stories. I have a daughter now and I have my eye on what could be watched, but I have to say it all just looks really boring. Everything looks so similar and commercial, like items that could be bought almost immediately." As a child in the '70s, she was obsessed with the hand-drawn Saturday morning cartoons of the time ("I liked the mainstream, crappy ones like Scooby-Doo and the early Warner Bros. cartoons -- back when they were still kind of scary."), but has resisted suggestions that she animate her work. "I'm attached to quiet and stillness," Ali says.
Indeed, Ali's simple line drawings sometimes look as if they were lonely panels from a comic book, or cartoons begging for captions. "In absence, you create a space for the viewer to verbalize, to say their own words," she says. "Even if they're words that don't make sense or are inappropriate." After all, gray area, Ali says, makes fertile ground for creating. "I know the silly side of art, and I know the serious side of art," Ali says. "But I think there's a lot that happens in the middle."
The Shadows Took Shape is on display through March 9th at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Indeed, Ali's simple line drawings sometimes look as if they were lonely panels from a comic book, or cartoons begging for captions. "In absence, you create a space for the viewer to verbalize, to say their own words," she says. "Even if they're words that don't make sense or are inappropriate." After all, gray area, Ali says, makes fertile ground for creating. "I know the silly side of art, and I know the serious side of art," Ali says. "But I think there's a lot that happens in the middle."
The Shadows Took Shape is on display through March 9th at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
All images courtesy of the artist.