Laylah Ali

“You don’t need much to make a drawing,” says artist Laylah Ali. “It is an inviting and fairly egalitarian medium.” Ali, who is a professor of art at Williams College, has been drawing and painting figural works for three decades. Her cartoon-style drawings of humanoid forms have attracted particular attention for their balance between levity and “human frailty, murky politics, and other complex combinations,” as Ali puts it. “I deliberately don’t operate in the world of realism. I want my figures...