Laylah Ali: Newspaper Clippings

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Art21 first featured artist Laylah Ali in 2005
0:00:01
Watch the original & uncut 13 minute film online! (via Hulu)

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Own Season 3 Today: DVD or iTunes
0:00:07
Laylah Ali is featured in the Art21 episode "Power" along with fellow artists Ida Applebroog, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. The Season 3 DVD features 4 episodes, 18 artists, and is available from PBS and Amazon.

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Swimmer Michael Phelps
0:01:16
Learn more about American athlete Michael Phelps.

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American Flag in Art
0:01:24
Modern Art Notes' Tyler Green did a multi-post series on the American flag in art leading up to the 2008 election: "Throughout this year-(plus)-long presidential campaign season, the American flag has been an issue in a way last seen in 1992, when flag burning was a major topic. [...] Artists have used the American flag in art for decades. I've asked many contemporary art curators to pick a favorite or particularly relevant work of art and to write a few words about it."

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Atrocities & Responsibility
0:01:49
Modern Art Notes' Tyler Green poses questions about the art museum's role in collecting and preserving images of atrocities:

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Laylah Ali Slideshow
0:02:18
View a selection of Laylah Ali's paintings and drawings, which include portraits: "I call them portraits, but I mean a portrait that really isn’t of someone who exists, these don’t exist except in my mind. They certainly act like portraits and they want to be portraits, but at the end of the day, I don’t know if they are. [...] The idea of portraiture is a kind of storytelling—a distilled storytelling. I am interested in distilled narratives so the idea of trying to tell a story or hint at something larger than the individual—through the individual—became interesting to me."

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Laylah Ali's Book Project
0:02:31
Watch more Laylah Ali videos on ArtBabble!

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Channels: American ArtContemporary Art
Artists: Laylah Ali
Themes: InspirationMaterials and Process

Exclusive Episode #049: In her Williamstown, MA studio, artist Laylah Ali discusses her system of organizing newspaper clippings, which includes photographs of swimmer Michael Phelps, soldiers, and American flags.

Laylah Ali creates gouache-on-paper paintings that take her many months to complete. Ali meticulously plots out in advance every aspect of her work, from subject matter to choice of color, achieving a high level of emotional tension in her paintings as a result of juxtaposing brightly colored scenes with dark, often violent subject matter. In style, her paintings resemble comic-book serials, but they also contain stylistic references to hieroglyphics and American folk-art traditions.

Learn more about Laylah Ali: http://www.art21.org/artists/laylah-ali

VIDEO: Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Tom Bergin. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Artwork courtesy: Laylah Ali.

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00:00:20 So, right now I am in the beginning stages of something. That’s what I am trying to think about the different ideas, the sort of what’s going be,

00:00:28 the overarching narrative and by looking at the news clippings, its one way that I think about it. It’s not the only thing that influences, but its one way

00:00:39 that I start thinking about what are some of the overarching narratives that are reported, but often it's just details, things that you might not pick up on.

00:00:55 If I am interested in something, if it falls into multiple categories, then I put it on the wall if I can't figure out what to put it in. And that means it's a sort of hovering between different places

00:01:05 and it’s interesting to me.

00:01:15 Like this Michael Phelps falls into the category of, well three actually. American flags, I have an American flag category, ways that American flags get used,

00:01:27 and I notice this swim cap that the Olympic American swimming team is using. I am also really interested in his teeth.

00:01:36 He's got these kind of fangs that come down, which I have been really interested in cause I use a lot of teeth in my work.

00:01:46 The news clippings often correlate to what you might think of as a public narrative in the work. The ones that people might recognize the strands of things

00:01:56 that you might think of that you have been reading about or hearing about, but they are never spot on. They never follow one conflict directly.

00:02:07 So, you might see a little bits and pieces of things that you recognize. So, Michael Phelps’ swim cap might appear in a new form on a soldier’s portrait that I am going to do

00:02:19 because in some ways they are serving as you know benign warriors or some of the swim team, the Olympic team that the flag emblazened on the swim caps so large.