She is known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.
[8] About the performative nature of her work, Ali says, "The paintings can be like crude stages or sets, the figures like characters in a play.
According to Charlotte Seaman, "Ali’s work is not grounded in the academic tradition, however it is informed by the rich history of caricature, especially as humorous or mocking social commentary".
Notably, though, her work is opposed to racial caricature in that it does not exaggerate features of an individual – rather the opposite: it turns individuals into signs or ciphers of generalized (though still racialized) human experience"[10] The subject of Ali's most well-known gouache paintings are Greenheads– characters designed to minimize, eliminate and interrogate categorical differences of gender, height, age, and in some ways race.
Ali drew on imagery and topics from newspapers, such as images of protest signs or world leaders hugging, but tweaked the stories in order to create something distant and new.
"[9] In 2002, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, commissioned Ali to create a wordless graphic novelette.
[14] The artist collaborated with dancer and choreographer Dean Moss at The Kitchen in 2005 and at MASS MoCA in 2006 with figures on a field.
[8] Other exhibitions include: Laylah Ali has been awarded a number of grants, residencies and awards, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2008,[23] the Joan Mitchell Foundation Residency in 2018,[24] the United States Artists Fellowship,[25] as well as being honored as an artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College, Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.