Black History Month: Ali and Chase-Riboud

The Curator’s Corner celebration of Black History Month continues with two contemporary artists whose personal visions are broadly different, but fascinating nonetheless—Laylah Ali and Barbara Chase-Riboud.

Laylah Ali (born 1968, United States), Untitled, 2001. Gouache and colored pencil on paper, 8 ⅛" x 11 9⁄16" (20.6 x 29.4 cm). Image courtesy Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York. © 2025 Laylah Ali. (AK-3675)

Ali frequently references comic-like situations in her work. Although the characters in this untitled work wear superhero capes, their gestures, eye movements, and expressions transcend a mere comic action sequence. There is a tension between the unlikely figures that evinces a sense of anxiety. Gesture and movement are important components in Ali’s work that encourage the viewer to speculate about the narrative intent. Another consistent element in Ali’s body of work is the removal of limbs, as seen here. This may reflect the artist’s concerns about disabled people, but it is treated in the comic manner of cartoon violence.

The art of Ali is a complex investigation of gender, race, greed, human weaknesses, and other human tendencies that, in art, are often treated individually. She explores these compound topics in the form of her preferred flat figuration. Her work combines the aesthetic of comic book or cartoon art with that of hieroglyphs or pictographs.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Ali admits to watching lots of TV, which helped her form her visual sensibility. Originally intending to be a lawyer, she received a BA from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1991. She went on to earn an MFA from Washington University, in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1994. Ali currently lives and works in Williamstown and is a professor at Williams College.

Barbara Chase-Riboud (born 1939, United States), Akhmatova’s Monument, study for a sculpture, 1995. Color offset lithograph on paper, 29 ⅞" x 21 ⅝" (75.9 x 54.9 cm). Published by Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia. Image courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2025 Barbara Chase-Riboud. (PMA-4944)

Chase-Riboud is a sculptor, writer, and poet. Her signature sculpture style is a combination of welded bronze with silk, rope, and other fibers. Her work often pays homage to great women and African Americans of the past. This print, Akhmatova's Monument, is a concept drawing. It is ostensibly a plan for a monumental sculpture, in this case a tribute to a fellow poet—the famous Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966). The tortured nature of this piece may reflect Akhmatova’s descriptions of her sufferings under Stalin in her epic poem Requiem.

Born in Philadelphia, Chase-Riboud began training in sculpture and the age of seven. She sold her first work, Reba, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York at age sixteen. Influenced by classical ancient sculpture and Baroque art, she earned her BFA from Temple University in 1956. Between 1957 and 1959, Chase-Riboud studied sculpture in Italy, then Egypt, Greece, and Turkey, where she expanded her vision beyond Western art. In 1960, she earned her MFA from Yale University, the first African American woman to do so. The following year, she moved permanently to Paris. Chase-Riboud published her first collection of poetry in 1974 and her first novel, Sally Hemmings: A Novel, in 1979.

Correlations to Davis programs: Davis Collections, Women Artists 2000s