Opening 14 March at MoMA is “Projects 75”, the latest event in the forum created in 1971 by the New York museum to give space to new artists. This time it is the turn of Afro-American artist Laylah Ali (born in Buffalo in 1968), with her first artist–comic book.

Despite taking on many influences from pop culture and comic strips, the work of Ali is becomes something quite different for the seriousness of its message, for the situations and the strength of the characters: soldiers and prisoners, doctors and patients, slaves and masters illustrated in the panels which follow one after another to narrate the story. Together, they put across the Ali’s major themes: group and individual identity, politics and power, race and social class.

Themes which are important but frozen in a surreal representational technique half way between a cartoon and a naïve painting.

14.3.2002 – 21.5.2002
Projects 75: Laylah Ali
https://www.moma.org