Guides: Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) & the ULS Collection: Black Futures: Carl Phillips and Laylah Ali

March 1, 2018 Event - Black Futures: Carl Phillips and Laylah Ali | A Reading, Lecture, and Conversation

Carl Phillips and Laylah Ali presented a reading, lecture and conversation.

Heinz Memorial Chapel

326 S. Bellefield Avenue, Pittsburgh

Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips is the author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018) and Reconnaissance (FSG, 2015). His latest book of prose is The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (Graywolf, 2014), and he has translated Sophocles’s Philoctetes (Oxford, 2004). A four-time finalist for the National Book Award, his honors include the PEN USA Award in Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. Currently the judge for the Yale Younger Poets Series, Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Laylah Ali

Laylah Ali was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1968, and lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. In style, her paintings resemble comic-book serials, but they also contain stylistic references to hieroglyphics and American folk-art traditions. Ali often achieves a high level of emotional tension in her work as a result of juxtaposing brightly colored scenes with dark, often violent subject matter that speaks of political resistance and social relationships. Her most famous and longest-running series of paintings depicts the brown-skinned and gender-neutral Greenheads, while her most recent works include portraits as well as more abstract biomorphic images. Ali endows the characters and scenes in her paintings with everyday attributes like dodge balls, sneakers, and Band-aids, as well as historically- and culturally-loaded items such as nooses, hoods, robes, masks, and military-style uniforms. Her drawings, which she describes as “automatic,” are looser and more playful than the paintings and are often the source of material that she explores more deeply in her paintings.

Laylah Ali has had 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 Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; among others. Her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2003) and the Whitney Biennial (2004).

Is Anything the Matter? by Laylah Ali (Artist); Karen Kurcynzski; Arisa White; Romi Crawford; Barbara Räcker (Editor)
ISBN: 9798218308711
Publication Date: 2024
Is anything the matter? is the most extensive book yet to document artist Laylah Ali's nearly three decades of drawings. With puzzling and fraught scenes that unsettle in their insistence on multiple readings, Ali's drawings use humor to invite the viewer into a nuanced conversation. Though the drawings range in format, they share a continuing theme in Ali's ongoing interest in the complex combinations of race, power, gendering, human frailty, and murky politics. With an introduction by Barbara Räcker, the catalog includes over 140 reproductions of drawings as well as a detailed examination of Ali's drawing practice by art historian Karen Kurcynzski, a lyric essay by poet Arisa White, and a new interview with art historian Romi Crawford. Among the series represented are: Self-Portraits with Nat Turner's Vision, one of her earliest drawing series; the Typology drawings, which are intentionally drained of color but rich in precise patterning; the Studies series, vivid figurative drawings executed on the back of wedding invitations; and Note drawings, poetic lists that chart the artist's reckoning with her daily encounters and stimuli. This 152-page book includes 156 images of drawings and sketchbook pages. Item number:
Laylah Ali: Note Drawings by Laylah Ali (Artist); Kevin Young (Text by); Dina Deitsch (Text by)
Call Number: NC139.A37 A4 2008
Publication Date: 2009
For the past decade, Laylah Ali has been interrogating the visual language of contemporary society through paintings and drawings inhabited by her subversive characters. The Note drawings presented in this catalogue reference Ali's earlier work, yet mark a departure to some degree. While language has always been at the heart of Ali's practice--in its limitations and misinterpretations--she has, in this series of drawings, incorporated actual text into her work. Where her figures were once ambiguous in gender and race, and even questionably human, they now have identifiable attributes of racial and sexual identity portrayed vividly by characters dressed in masks, wigs and a variety of headdresses and costumes. Handwritten directly under and over her figures are random thoughts, snatches of overheard conversation and odd sound bites that question conventional visual markers and allude to racial and political struggles. Item number: 31735059714083
Laylah Ali: Typology by Laylah Ali (Illustrator); Alex Baker (Text by)
Call Number: NC139.A37 A4 2007
Publication Date: 2007
Ashoka Maurya--or Ashoka the Great as he was later known--holds a special place in the history of India. Through his third century BCE quest to govern the Indian subcontinent by moral force alone, Ashoka transformed Buddhism from a minor sect into a major world religion. His bold experiment ended in tragedy, and in the tumult that followed the historical record was cleansed so effectively that his name was largely forgotten for almost two thousand years. Yet, a few mysterious stone monuments and inscriptions miraculously survived the purge. In Ashoka: The Search for India's Lost Emperor, historian Charles Allen tells the incredible story of how a few enterprising archaeologists deciphered the mysterious lettering on keystones and recovered India's ancient past. Drawing from rich sources, Allen crafts a clearer picture of this enigmatic figure than ever before. Item number: 31735060324120
Types by Laylah Ali
Call Number: t N7433.4.A42 T97 2004
Publication Date: 2004
Known for her cartoon-like characters engaged in ambiguous activities, Laylah Ali's paintings and drawings imply narratives that address a wide variety of political, cultural, and social concerns. Her carefully-created images are deceptive with their buoyant color, yet at the same time delve into some of the more disturbing impulses revealed in the workings of individuals and groups. Often creating characters that represent the many facets of social and racial identity, this special artist book, Types, includes new drawings that are representative of the different "types" of characters Ali creates. Keeping with the intimate scale of her works, this 36-page book includes 14 new black and white color drawings. Each image is juxtaposed next to a solid block of color in order to heighten the intricate details of these new depictions. Item: 31735052419003
Laylah Ali by Laylah Ali (Artist)
Call Number: N6537.A457 A6 2002
Publication Date: 2002
Laylah Ali's gouache-and-ink drawings previously only implied violence, but here her interrupted narratives and pared-down, comic-book aesthetic present a perilous world where a wounded civilization and psychology meet. Psychopolitical situations are frozen in individual frames, populated by figures dressed in costumes derived from superheroes and prison guards, their limbs hacked off, their faces mangled, their bodies bandaged and their necks hung by nooses at the end of page-long ropes. Also taking up issues of gender and race, these drawings offer only the most uncomfortable conclusions. Item number: 31735047694702
Laylah Ali by Laylah Ali (Artist)
Call Number: ND237.A416 A4 2001
Publication Date: 2001
Catalog for the exhibition "Laylah Ali, ICA Artist Prize 2000", held at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, April 18-July 1, 2001. Includes an interview of Ali by Rebecca Walker. Ali's exquisitely rendered gouache-on-paper paintings chronicle the dystopian world of her enigmatic green-headed figures. This provocative imagery is open-ended, darkly humorous and triggers a range of associations through their references to the media, historical events and racial and gender tropes. Item number: 31735051523086

The Art of Daring by Carl Phillips
Call Number: PS3566.H476 A78 2014
Publication Date: 2014
In seven insightful essays, Carl Phillips meditates on the craft of poetry, its capacity for making a space for possibility and inquiry. What does it mean to give shapelessness a form? How can a poem explore both the natural world and the inner world? The Art of Daring is a lyrical, persuasive argument for the many ways that writing and living are acts of risk. Item number: 31735067633093
Wild Is the Wind by Carl Phillips
Call Number: PS3566.H476 A6 2018
Publication Date: 2018
How do we say no to despair, and instead take the risk of believing in something that offers no guarantee? Phillips reflects on the instability of life and love, and examines the past as both history and memory. Explore how the past can teach us and mislead us, and make us hesitate in the face of love. Item number: 31735070503952
Reconnaissance by Carl Phillips
Call Number: PS3566.H476 A6 2016
Publication Date: 2016
The territory of Reconnaissance is one where morals threaten to become merely "what the light falls through," "suffering [seems] in fact for nothing," and maybe "all we do is all we can do." In the face of this, Carl Phillips, reconsidering and unraveling what we think we know, maps out the contours of a world in revision, where truth lies captured at one moment and at the next goes free, transformed. Item number: 31735070571405
Silverchest by Carl Phillips
Call Number: PS3566.H476 S55 2013
Publication Date: 2013
In Silverchest, his twelfth book, Carl Phillips considers how our fears and excesses, the damage we cause both to others and to ourselves, intentional and not, can lead not only to a kind of wisdom but also to renewal, maybe even joy, if we're willing to commit fully to a life in which "I love you / means what, exactly?" In poems shot through with his signature mix of eros, restless energy, and moral scrutiny, Phillips argues for the particular courage it takes to look at the self squarely--not with judgment but with understanding--and extend that self more honestly toward others. Item number: 31735070571397
Double Shadow by Carl Phillips
Call Number: PS3566.H476 D68 2011
Publication Date: 2011
Comparing any human life to "a restless choir" of impulses variously in conflict and at peace with one another, Carl Phillips, in his eleventh book, examines the double shadow that a life casts forth: "now risk, and now / faintheartedness." In poems that both embody and inhabit this double shadow, risk and faintheartedness prove to have the power equally to rescue us from ourselves and to destroy us. Spare, haunted, and haunting, yet not without hope,Double Shadow argues for life as a wilderness through which there's only the questing forward--with no regrets and no looking back. Double Shadow is a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry. Winner of the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011. Item number: 31735060565847
Speak Low by Carl Phillips
Call Number: PS3566.H476 S64 2009
Publication Date: 2009
Speak Low is the tenth book from one of America's most distinctive--and one of poetry's most essential--contemporary voices. Phillips has long been hailed for work provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft. These new poems are of a piece with Phillips's previous work in their characteristic clarity and originality of thought, in their unsparing approach to morality and psychology, and in both the strength and startling flexibility of their line. Speak Low is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry. Item number: 31735059739270
Quiver of Arrows by Carl Phillips
Call Number: PS3566.H476 Q58 2007
Publication Date: 2007
Quiver of Arrows is a generous gathering from Carl Phillips's work that showcases the twenty-year evolution of one of America's most distinctive--and one of poetry's most essential--contemporary voices. Hailed from the beginning of his career for a poetry provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft, Phillips has in the course of eight critically acclaimed collections generated a sustained meditation on the restless and ever-shifting myth of human identity. Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason: these are among the lenses through which Phillips examines what it means to be that most bewildering, irresolvable conundrum, a human being in the world. Item number: 31735056212560
Coin of the Realm by Carl Phillips
Call Number: PS3566.H476 C6 2004
Publication Date: 2004
Award-winning poet Carl Phillips grapples with issues of authority, identity and beauty in these sensual and deeply intelligent critical essays. He attends to the life and art of poetry by examining traditions across literary and cultural histories, from the restiveness of the Psalms, the pleas and persuasions of George Herbert, and the identity politics of the Black Arts Movement, to the Classically inflected restraint and release of his own poetry. Item number: 31735049341559
The Tether by Carl Phillips
Call Number: PS3566.H476 T4 2001
Publication Date: 2001
Graceful and resonant work by a lyric poet at the height of his skill. In the art of falconry, during training the tether between the gloved fist and the raptor's anklets is gradually lengthened and eventually unnecessary. In these new lyric poems, Carl Phillips considers the substance of connection -- between lover and beloved, mind and body, talon and perch -- and its the cable of mutual trust between soaring figure and shadowed ground. In The Tether, his fifth book, Phillips's characteristically cascading poetic line is leaner and more dramatic than ever. Item number: 31735043405236
Pastoral by Carl Phillips
Call Number: PS3566.H476 P3 2000
Publication Date: 2000
Phillips here creates a shadowy inner landscape, one where the field is the heart, and the heart itself has a beautifully yet often treacherously flawed darkness that each of us--believing in the possibility of light--seeks to penetrate. Examining how to fill and fulfill the life granted us--how to realize the self entirely, and in time--these rhythmically sequenced meditations circle the predicaments of our longing against the formal backdrop of pastoral tradition. How do we balance control and abandonment when making poetry? Or when making a life with another person? How do we reconcile fleshly desire and spiritual intention? Tightly coherent and emotionally nuanced, "Pastoral" enlarges--and also defines--Phillips's already impressive poetic landscape. Item number: 31735042914980