“The show we need right now.”

That’s how Amanda Herman, associate director of the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst, describes an exhibition of more than 100 drawings by Williams art professor Laylah Ali ’91, on view through May 9.

“Is anything the matter?” encompasses 30 years’ worth of Ali’s work from 12 different series. The drawings explore “the amalgam of race, power, gender, human frailty, murky politics and other complex combinations that are so often treated as separate entities,” as Ali writes in her artist statement.

The show spans works from her earliest series, “Self Portraits With Nat Turner’s Vision,” begun at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture when Ali was in graduate school, through 2020’s “Harbinger” drawings, which touch on the death of Ali’s mother during the Covid-19 pandemic. Each series takes a different approach to materials and style.

At the University Museum of Contemporary Art, students are engaging with Ali’s work in multiple ways. Among them, a nursing research class came in for a close looking and discussion session, language students spoke about the work in Italian, and an education class is using the drawings as a case study to create a curriculum, Herman says.

UMass Amherst is the exhibition’s second stop on a tour of teaching museums. The first iteration of the show opened in January 2024 at the Cathy and Jesse Marion Art Gallery at the State University of New York at Fredonia, not far from Ali’s hometown of Buffalo, N.Y. After the Amherst run is finished, the show will be on view at Colby College in the fall of 2025.

“I wanted the works to be at college galleries and be in environments that are study-centered and generative,” Ali says, adding that viewers are invited to engage with the question raised by the title of the exhibition in whatever context makes sense to them—personal, political, social. And those contexts are always changing.

The question “Is anything the matter?” may have elicited different answers in early 2024 than it does today or than it will in the fall—and that’s the point, says Ali, who is the college’s art department co-chair, chair of studio art and the Alexander Falck Class of 1899 Professor of Art.

“These are legitimate, necessary explorations,” she adds. “Suddenly this stuff is controversial again.”

Ali is scheduled to give an artist talk on April 9 at the University Museum of Contemporary Art.