Laylah Ali was born in 1968. It was a year marked by cataclysmic change: movements, invasions, offensives, assassinations, and a student demonstration-turned-massacre in Mexico punctuated by black-gloved fists raised in the air at the Summer Olympics gathered like storm clouds over the optimism of the previous year. Perhaps I’m forcing connections—maybe it’s just coincidence that Ali grew up to create an exacting visual art out of social and political commentary using similar gestures, but it’d be folly to chalk up the reflective precision of her paintings to her schooling alone.

Ali earned an M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1994, and studied at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Her fascination with weakling superheroes, regimentation, alliance and betrayals, ambiguously tense environments, and, curiously, dodgeball, led to the Greenheads, a series of more than sixty paintings Ali began exhibiting in 1998. These figures, rendered in meticulous detail, are expressive, brown-limbed, razor-thin androgynes, all related by their eponymous green heads yet often segregated by colorful uniforms, accessorized by belts, masks, or rank-denoting headdresses. One such figure, in headdress and white tunic, might be a boss scolding three alternately incredulous, defiant, and apologetic-looking underlings for a botched job, or a survivor pointing out captured war criminals accused of heinous acts.

Ali’s Greenheads has sparked a good deal of debate, from discussions of race, class, and political content in visual art to conversations about the richness (or legitimacy) of genre-crossing between fine art and illustration. Always, though, people ask: how are we supposed to know what these paintings are really about? Though reminiscent of tribunal scenes, war games, comic books, and the absurdist stagings of Adrienne Kennedy and Samuel Beckett, her paintings are free of the slogans, captions, and loaded titles we might expect from such politically charged work. Viewers and curators alike are left to mine their own perspectives and imaginations for answers, and, fortunately, they enjoy ample opportunity to do so. Ali has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, (which commissioned her to produce a wordless graphic novelette—which, like much of her work, is untitled—in 2002); ICA, Boston; MCA, Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and MASS MoCA, among others, as well as showing her works at such exhibitions as the Venice Biennale (2003) and the Whitney Biennial (2004). She is also a featured artist in the PBS series Art: 21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, broadcast beginning fall 2005.

Now that the Greenheads has firmly established her vocabulary as an artist and thinker, Ali has taken...