Samia Halaby
Samia A. Halaby is a Palestinian-American visual artist, activist, educator, and scholar. Halaby is recognized as a pioneer of abstract painting and Computer art. Since beginning her artistic career in the late 1950s, she has exhibited in museums, galleries, and art fairs throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. Her work is housed in public and private collections around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Institut du Monde Arabe, and the Palestinian Museum. Her work was included in the 2024 Venice Biennale. She is represented by Andrée Sfeir-Semler's gallery, operating in Beirut and Hamburg.
Early life
Halaby was born in Jerusalem on December 12, 1936, during the British Mandate of Palestine. She is the daughter of Asaad Halaby and Foutonie Atallah Halaby. Samia has two older brothers, Dr. Sami and Dr. Fouad Halaby, and a younger sister, Dr. Nahida Halaby. Their father was orphaned and, at a young age, had the financial responsibility of supporting his siblings thrust upon him. He began the first taxi service in Jerusalem in the early 1900s, eventually becoming a principal of Lind & Halaby Ltd., a seller of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Their mother was educated at the Friends School in Ramallah. She was referred to as "the encyclopedia of the family".Halaby attended the British Tabitha Mission School. Halaby retains vivid visual memories of her life in Palestine, especially of the trees and leaves in her grandmother Maryam Atallah's garden in Jerusalem. As a young child Samia would experience synesthetic colors and shapes that would correlate with various family members. Her sister was a rounded and yellow/white iridescent; Samia was a dark metallic red sideways railroad. In 1948, Halaby and her family fled their home in the port city of Yafa during the Nakba. She was 11 years old. Her family fled to Lebanon, residing in Beirut until 1951, before eventually settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. Halaby graduated from North College Hill High School.
Career
Halaby received her academic training in the Midwestern United States. She was active in American academia and taught art at the university level for over twenty years, a decade of which was spent as an associate professor at the Yale School of Art, where she was the first woman to hold the position of associate professor. She also taught at the University of Hawaii, Indiana University, the Cooper Union, the University of Michigan, and the Kansas City Art Institute.Based in New York City since 1976, Halaby has long been active in the city's art scene, mainly through independent and non-profit art spaces and artist-run initiatives. In addition, she has participated in leftist political organizing for various causes. She has long been an activist and in 2019 endowed the Samia A. Halaby Foundation to support Palestinian women and children.
Scholarship on Palestinian art
As an independent scholar she has contributed to the documentation of Palestinian art of the twentieth century through many texts including her 2001 book Liberation Art of Palestine: Palestinian Painting and Sculpture in the Second Half of the 20th Century, and a chapter titled "The Pictorial Arts of Jerusalem During the First Half of the 20th Century" that appears in the 2012 book Jerusalem Interrupted: Modernity and Colonial Transformation 1917-Present, and through several curated exhibitions of Palestinian art in the US. She has also lectured widely on the subject in galleries and universities throughout the United States and in venues in the Arab world.She was instrumental in the 2003 landmark exhibition Made in Palestine, which was organized by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston and curated by James Harithas, Tex Kerschen, and Gabriel Delgado. Halaby actively assisted the curators in researching Palestinian artists, both in the United States and the Arab world, introducing them to such artists as the late Mustapha Hallaj in Syria and Abdul Hay al Mussalam in Jordan, for example. The first museum exhibition of Palestinian art to be held in the US, Made in Palestine went on to tour throughout the country.
The 2004 exhibition The Subject of Palestine, which Halaby curated for the DePaul Art Museum, was described by the Chicago Tribune as presenting "the work of 16 contemporary Palestinian artists that even the least informed of viewers are likely to come away with the sense that they have seen and grasped something important." The review went on to congratulate DePaul Art Museum for its "incisive presentation".
Cancelled 2024 retrospective
Halaby's first retrospective exhibition in the United States, titled Centers of Energy and curated by Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert, was scheduled to open in 2024 at Indiana University Bloomington’s Eskenazi Museum of Art, but the show was cancelled in December 2023. The University cited "safety concerns" as the reason for cancelling her show. Halaby believed the reason for the cancellation of her show was to suppress Palestinian voices during the Gaza war, saying the cancellation was "an extension of what's happening in Gaza, where Palestinians are not allowed to speak or express our opinion." In October 2024, Michigan State University removed Six Golden Heroes, a painting referring to the escape of Palestinian political prisoners.Halaby was awarded the 2025 Munch Award for Artistic Freedom in September 2025.
Painting style
Halaby primarily works in abstraction but has also utilized a documentary-style of figurative drawing in more politically oriented works, such as her Kafr Qasm series. She has designed dozens of political posters and banners for various anti-war causes, and is featured in the publication The Design of Dissent. The development of her work over the past fifty years has been closely related to locating the many principles of abstraction in nature utilizing a materialist approach. A number of her paintings have been created by building upon the methods and forms of certain historical applications of abstraction, such as that of the Russian Constructivists, and examples of traditional Arabic arts and Islamic architecture. The visual culture of Palestine and its natural setting have also figured into her paintings, as has the dynamism of New York City as experienced in the sights of people in motion and its busy streetsHer approach to abstraction has ranged from works exploring the visual properties of the geometric still life to free-form paintings in the form of collaged pieces of canvas that are joined to create larger abstractions that are free from the stretch. As of 2020, her oeuvre contained more than 3,000 works, including paintings, digital media, three-dimensional hanging sculptures, artist books, drawings, and limited edition artist prints.
After retiring from teaching, Halaby began experimenting with electronic art forms, teaching herself how to program Basic and C programming languages on an Amiga computer and later on a PC. Creating programs that would allow viewers to witness the process of live computerized painting, she enlisted the help of musicians for kinetic art performances that were inspired by jam sessions. Her "Kinetic Painting Group" toured extensively in the late 1990s, and video works continue to be shown across the world.
Abstract color (1963–1965)
During her final student days and for a period after, Halaby's approach to painting was characterized by flat color; in these works, relationships of luminosity and simultaneous contrast were inspired by the minimalists and by the work of Josef Albers and his book Interaction of Color. In terms of shape, the work depended essentially on the rectangular surfaces of human life, be they walls, windows, writing paper, floors, cards, or gently hung weavings. The variety of scale and placement was clearly an abstraction from ways of examining the world we see. During that short span, Halaby left Bloomington to teach in Honolulu at the University of Hawaii, then moved to Kansas City to teach at the Kansas City Art Institute, her second teaching position.Geometric still-life (1966–1970)
After 1965, a scientific attitude of exactly how we observe and interpret what we see overtook her. She has written, "I began to feel that I must make a clean, new beginning and erase my teachers and my past out of my thoughts." At this point, Halaby relied on what she saw at museums and her knowledge of art history to develop her new way of thinking. She examined Rembrandt and his use of light and color in portraiture, and was particularly impressed with the Old Master collection at the Kansas City Museum. After an extended and frustrating exploration, a small orange on a windowsill captured Halaby's attention and started the new series. This inspiration can be attributed to the painting Virgin and Child in Domestic Interior by Flemish master Petrus Christus in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Gallery of Art in Kansas City. Halaby was then teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute and leading a boldly experimental program for first-year students.As she describes her interest in later writing, Halaby tells of revisiting the museum to examine how artists historically treated edges. From her thorough education at the University of Cincinnati, Halaby understood the failures of perspective. She wanted to know exactly what it is we see when our eye travels over the surface of a spherical or cylindrical object, reaches the edge and then jumps to a far background. Finding no answers, Halaby realized that how we see is educated. Over millennia, artists have contributed the multitude of small discoveries that created the monument of visual culture that teaches us how to see—what Halaby calls "visual conjugation." This then became, to Halaby, the important challenge as she insisted that painting is exploration not performance.