Is anything the matter?
- Drawings by Laylah Ali
- February 14 – May 9
- Opening reception: Thursday, February 13, 5-7 p.m. / Randolph W. Bromery Center for the Arts lobby
- Artist talk: April 9, 6:00 p.m. / Old Chapel
Is anything the matter? includes more than one hundred drawings by Laylah Ali dating from 1993 to 2020. Though the drawings range in format — including ink, colored pencil, soluble crayon, colored marker, and mixed media works — each piece explores Ali’s ongoing interest in the amalgam of race, power, gendering, human frailty, and murky politics.
Spanning nearly three decades of Ali’s work, the exhibition spans the museums’ Main and West galleries, and allows visitors to discover stylistic and contextual similarities, contrasts, and shifts in her drawings over time.
Laylah Ali was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1968, and she currently lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Ali has previously held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2003) and the Whitney Biennial (2004).
The University Museum of Contemporary Art is the second venue for this traveling exhibition. It first opened in 2024 at the Cathy and Jessie Marion Art Gallery at the State University of New York in Fredonia. The third venue, Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, will show Is anything the matter? in the fall of 2025.
Gallery talk with Professor of Contemporary and Modern Art Karen Kurcynski
February 19, 4-5 p.m.
Join Karen Kurczynski, professor of contemporary and modern art in the UMass History of Art and Architecture Department, for a gallery talk on Ali's exhibition.
Kurczynski wrote an essay titled “Power in Play: The Drawings of Laylah Ali” for the exhibition catalog, which accompanies the exhibition as it travels to three venues over the course of two years. Ali’s drawings are also subject in Kurcynski's book project, “Drawing in Color: Power and Vulnerability in Art of the 1990s.”
“[The drawings] range from colorful imaginative portraits to comic-inspired scenarios that comment on everything from racial violence to gender politics in contemporary society,” says Kurczynski.
Come visit the exhibition and hear Kurcynski's insights on February 19 from 4-5 p.m.
